Download or read book Understanding John Barth written by Stanley Fogel and published by Columbia : University of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive guide to the major writings of John Barth - the author of The Floating Opera, The End of the Road, Chimera, The Tidewater Tales: A Novel and other works. With roots in the 20-century existential tradition, Barth sees human beings stripped of their beliefs in universal values and systems of belief - in God, tradition, reason or literary formulations. He is concerned about the kinds of choices that fulfill human and artistic potential and those that lead to failure, and he is equally concerned about how those choices affect the environment. Art, to him, shapes an awareness not only of literature itself but of self, culture and history, so he tries to review these areas against the grain.
Download or read book John Barth written by David Morrell and published by David Morrell. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1969, while David Morrell was writing First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created, he also wrote his doctoral dissertation about acclaimed author, John Barth. In it, Morrell analyses Barth’s early fiction, using interviews with Barth, his agent, and his editors as well as several of Barth’s unpublished essays and letters to tell what Morrell calls “the story behind the stories, a biography of Barth’s fiction.” Over the years, scholars have found John Barth: An Introduction invaluable for its lengthy biographical sections, which Barth himself approved. Fans of Morrell’s fiction will find this book enlightening in terms of what Barth taught him about writing. CRITICAL REACTION “David Morrell’s not just a fine writer; he’s also a great and generous teacher.” —New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block “Morrell has written an interesting and informative book which reads occasionally like a biography. His prose is eminently clear and straightforward. His book has something for everyone. There is no doubt that it will become a necessity for serious students of Barth, and that, coincidentally, it is a genuinely interesting book.” —Journal of Modern Literature “Morrell’s study tells the story of Barth’s storytelling, how he got his ideas, and then how the publishers and reviewers dealt with them. He includes detailed biographical information [and] writes with great economy and clarity.” —Modern Fiction Studies “Morrell gives the reader the benefit of his familiarity with Barth and his manuscripts to plot the career of each work, from plans and, in some cases, research through revision, publisher-agent reactions, sales, and post-publication revisions. The whole enterprise is carried off with appealing confidence and informality that add up to an eminently readable book.” —World Literature Today
Download or read book Chimera written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In CHIMERAJohn Barth injects his signature wit into the tales of Scheherezade of the Thousand and One Nights, Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, and Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus. In a book that the Washington Post called "stylishly maned, tragically songful, and serpentinely elegant,” Barth retells these tales from varying perspectives, examining the myths’ relationship to reality and their resonance with the contemporary world. A winner of the National Book Award, this feisty, witty, sometimes bawdy book provoked Playboy to comment, "There’s every chance in the world that John Barth is a genius.”
Download or read book Coming Soon written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2001 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this novelistic romp that is by turns hilarious and brilliant, John Barth spoofs his own place in the pantheon of contemporary fiction and the generation of writers who have followed his literary trailblazing. Coming Soon!!! is the tale of two writers: an older, retiring novelist setting out to write his last work and a young, aspiring writer of hypertext intent on toppling his master. In the heat of their rivalry, the writers navigate, and sometimes stumble over, the cultural fault lines between print and electronic fiction, mentor and mentee, postmodernism and modernism.
Download or read book The Floating Opera written by John Barth and published by American Literature. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written when John Barth was 24 years old, The Floating Opera is his first novel, published in 1957. It is a first-person reminiscence of the day Todd Andrews decided to commit suicide. Having picked up some sense of the French Existentialist writers from the postwar Zeitgeist, this novel questions life's value through the eyes of a 37-year-old man.
Download or read book Letters written by John Barth and published by Putnam Publishing Group. This book was released on 1979 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark of postmodern American fiction, Letters is (as the subtitle genially informs us) "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls and dreamers each of which imagines himself factual". Seven characters (including the Author himself) exchange a novel's worth of letters during a 7-month period in 1969, a time of revolution that recalls the U.S.'s first revolution in the 18th century - the heyday of the epistolary novel. Recapitulating American history as well as the plots of his first six novels, Barth's seventh novel is a witty and profound exploration of the nature of revolution and renewal, rebellion and reenactment, at both the private and public levels. It is also an ingenious meditation on the genre of the novel itself, recycling an older form to explore new directions, new possibilities for the novel.
Download or read book On with the Story written by John Barth and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 1997-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using the venerable literary device of the bedtime story, which links fictions as different as The Arabian Nights and Charlotte's Web, John Barth ingeniously interweaves stories from an ongoing, high-spirited but deadly serious nocturnal game of tale-telling by a more or less desperate loving couple vacationing at their "last resort". As Scheherazade spun out her bedtime stories to save her life, the narrator of On with the Story spins out his to postpone The End, and to explore en route - wittily, mournfully, tenderly - love in modern life and postmodern literature. As the narrative cycles through the lifescapes of his subjects' stories, Barth affords a view both panoramic and microscopic of our own landscape. With eye and pen both sharp and beautiful he depicts love ranging from the obsessively puppy through the sophisticatedly fatigued, the delusionally murderous, even the quantum-physical, to the superbly fulfilled.
Download or read book The Book of Ten Nights and a Night written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book of Ten Nights and a Night offers both a keen introduction to the genius of John Barth and a deeply human argument for the enduring value of literature. Gathering stories written throughout this postmodern master's long career, the collection spans his entire range of styles, from straightforward narrative to experimental metafiction. In the time immediately following September 11, 2001, the veteran writer Graybard spends eleven nights with a nubile muse named WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). The two lovers debate the meaning and relevance of writing and storytelling in the wake of disaster, telling a new tale each night in the tradition of Scheherazade. The Book of Ten Nights and a Night exhibits the thrilling blend of playfulness and illuminating insight that have marked Barth as one of America's most distinguished writers.
Download or read book Lost in the Funhouse written by John Barth and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-06-25 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction exploring themes of purpose and the meaning of existence. "[Barth] ran riot over literary rules and conventions, even as he displayed, with meticulous discipline, mastery of and respect for them." —The New York Times From its opening story, "Frame-Tale"--printed sideways and designed to be cut out by the reader and twisted into a never-ending Mobius strip--to the much-anthologized "Life-Story," whose details are left to the reader to "fill in the blank," Barth's acclaimed collection challenges our ideas of what fiction can do. Highlights include the Homerian story-wthin-a-story-within-a-story (times seven) of "Menalaiad,' and "Night-Sea Journey," a first-person account of a confused human sperm on its way to fertilize an egg. All of the characters in Lost in the Funhouse are searching, in one way or another, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence. Together, their stories form a kaleidescope of exuberant metafictional inventiveness.
Download or read book Witness to the Word written by Karl Barth and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2003-06-03 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Barth's lectures on the first chapter of the Gospel of John, delivered at Muenster in 1925-26 and at Bonn in 1933, came at an important time in his life, when he was turning his attention more fully to dogmatics. Theological interpretation was thus his primary concern, especially the relation between revelation and the witness to revelation, which helped to shape his formulation of the role of the written (and spoken) word vis-a-vis the incarnate Word. The text is divided into three sections - John 1:1-18, 19-34, 35-51, with the largest share of the book devoted to the first section. Each section begins with Barth's own translation, followed by verse-by -verse and phrase-by-phrase commentary on the Greek text. Although Barth's interpretation is decidedly theological, he does take up questions of philology and textual criticism more thoroughly than in his other works. Much has happened in Johannine scholarship since these lectures were first delivered, yet they remain valuable today - 100 years after Barth's birth - both for their insights into the gospel and into Karl Barth.
Download or read book John Barth and Postmodernism written by Berndt Clavier and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Barth's eminence as a postmodernist is indisputable. However, much of the criticism dealing with his work is prompted by his own theories of «exhaustion» and subsequent «replenishment, » leaving his writing relatively untouched by theories of postmodernism in general. This book changes that by focusing on the relationship between Barth's aesthetic and the ideology critique of the historical avant-gardes, which were the first to mobilize art against itself and its institutional practices and demands. Examining Barth's metafictional parodies in the light of theories of space and subjectivity, Clavier engages the question of ideology critique in postmodernism by offering the montage as a possible model for understanding Barth's fiction. In such a light, postmodernism may well be perceived as a mimesis of reality, particularly a recognition of the collective nature of self and the world.
Download or read book The Development written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2008 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most celebrated masters, a touching, comic, deeply humane collection of linked stories about surprising developments in a gated community "I find myself inclined to set down for whomever, before my memory goes kaput altogether, some account of our little community, in particular of what Margie and I consider to have been its most interesting hour: the summer of the Peeping Tom." Something has disturbed the comfortably retired denizens of a pristine Florida-style gated community in Chesapeake Bay country. In the dawn of the new millennium and the evening of their lives, these empty nesters discover that their tidy enclave can be as colorful, shocking, and surreal as any of John Barth's fictional locales. From the high jinks of a toga party to marital infidelities, a baffling suicide pact, and the sudden, apocalyptic destruction of the short-lived development, Barth brings mordant humor and compassion to the lives of characters we all know well. From "one of the most prodigally gifted comic novelists writing in English today" (Newsweek), The Development is John Barth at his most accessible and sympathetic best.
Download or read book The Friday Book written by John Barth and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...The Friday Book was the first work of nonfiction by novelist John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, and Chimera. Taking its title from the day of the week Barth would devote to nonfiction, the three dozen essays discuss a wide range of topics from the blue crabs of Barth's beloved Chesapeake Bay to weighty literary subjects such as Borges, Homer, and semiotics..."--www.amazon.com.
Download or read book American Fiction American Myth written by Philip Young and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few experts in American literature have written as insightfully and brilliantly as did Philip Young, renowned Hemingway critic and scholar at large. His unique work bursts with a joy in the humanities, with a sensibility, a humor, and a style that communicate to academics and general readers alike. Although Young died in 1991, he survives in his remarkable prose. American Fiction, American Myth features nineteen groundbreaking essays in which Young masterfully reveals the &"so what?&" that he insisted all literary studies ought to have. In the first section, he demonstrates his fascination with such American myths as Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle, reaching powerful conclusions about America and its people. In the second section, he becomes &"Our Hemingway Man,&" explaining his germinal and still provocative theory that Hemingway's severe wounding in World War I so traumatized the novelist that his fiction was to a great degree unwitting self-psychoanalysis. Young's book on Hemingway was the first of its kind, but Young was more than a one-author critic, as his essays demonstrate in the third section, exploring such diverse topics as Hawthorne's secret love, the Lost Generation that was never lost, F. Scott Fitzgerald&’s debt to T. S. Eliot, and the relationship between American fiction and American life. What Hemingway once said about himself can be equally applied to Young: &"I am a very serious but not a solemn writer.&" The reader comes away from these essays dazzled by the power of Young's observations and the grace with which he expresses them.
Download or read book Where Three Roads Meet written by John Barth and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-12-04 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award winner, three linked novellas that “will stretch your mind, challenge your thoughts, and bend your reality” (Charlotte Observer). John Barth, “one of the greatest novelists of our time” (Washington Post Book World) and “the master of experimental fiction” (Details), presents a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users. The first novella, “Tell Me,” explores a callow undergraduate’s initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second, “I’ve Been Told,” traces no less than the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of “As I Was Saying . . . ” record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicing of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist. Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth’s deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet “employs all of his familiar devices—alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns—to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate—obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously—a farewell to language and its objects: us” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “Barth is markedly intelligent about language and often very funny.” —The New York Times “Perhaps the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today.” —Newsweek
Download or read book The Tidewater Tales written by John Barth and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997-02-15 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barth's richest, most joyous novel yet describes a couple's journey on the Chesapeake Bay, a cruise that overflows with stories--of past lives and love, entanglements with the CIA and toxic waste, and inventive brushes with Don Quixote, Odysseus and Scheherazade.
Download or read book The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor written by John Barth and published by Dalkey Archive Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Award winner offers his most inventive novel to date. Journalist Simon Behler finds himself in the house of Sinbad the Sailor after being washed ashore during a sea-going adventure. Over the course of six evenings, the two take turns recounting their voyages in a brilliantly entertaining weave of stories within stories. "Filled with white nights and golden days . . . lyrical, fresh and sprightly."--Washington Post.
