John Barth, A Biography
(Zev Kremen)
John Barth was born in Maryland in 1930. He is an artist who is more
interested in the process of storytelling than in the story itself.
Unlike Pynchon, who deludes the reader by false trails and possible
clues, akin to a detective novel, Barth seduces his audience into a
hall of crooked mirrors that exaggerate some features while minimizing
others. Realism is the enemy for Barth, the author of Lost in Funhouse
(1968), composed of 14 stories that annoyingly dwell on the process of
writing and reading. Barth intends to keep the reader alert to the
artifice of writing, to prevent the reader from being drawn into the
story as if it were real. To demolish the illusion of reality, Barth
uses panoply of reflexive devices to remind his audience that they are
reading.Barth?s earlier works, like Saul Bellow?s, are
inquiring and reflexive, exploiting the 1950?s themes of escape and
wanderlust. In The Floating Opera, a man considers suicide. The End of
the Road examines a complex love affair. His works of the 1960?s became
more amusing and less realistic. The Sot-weed Factor lampoons
18-century clever-rogue themes, while Giles Goat-Boy is a parody of the
world seen as a college. Another work, Chimera, dwells on Greek
mythology and in Letters Barth himself figures as a character, as
Norman Mailer does in The Armies of the Night. In Sabbatical: A
Romance, Barth uses the popular fiction motif of the spy: a woman
professor married to a retired secret agent-turned writer.
Resumos Relacionados
- On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
- Thomas Pynchon, A Biography
- On Writing
- New York Trilogy
- Once Upon A Blind Date
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