J. B. et la creation romanesque| influence recue de la forme epistolaire du 18 siecle| imitation des documents de la vie. Le post-modernisme et la fin du roman? Langage et mythopoetique...

Summary Since his retirement in the early nineteen nineties as a professor of creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, John Barth has published three new works: Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera (1994) ‐ which he calls a “semi‐novel semi‐reminiscence”; Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction (1995) ‐a collection of essays; and On With the Story: Stories (1996) ‐ a collection of short stories. The title and contents of this latest work confirm my earlier hypothesis that Barth's entire later work is governed by the principle of what I have come to call “narrativist mimesis”; the ultimate form of poststructuralist mimesis. His fictions have over the years developed an ongoing critique of forms of mimesis, moving from realist and mythemic to poststructuralist and narrativist mimesis.1 Concurrently we also see in Barth's later fiction that not only the genesis, but also the viability and survival of fiction as such, are other major concerns. Part of his programme forthe rep...

An Interview with John Barth

“Scheherazade, c'est moi”: Narrativist mimesis and the principle of metaphoric means in John Barth

End of the Road, the 1970 film adaptation of John Barth's 1958 novel The End of the Road, offers an object lesson in the perils of transferring a subjective verbal medium, literary fiction, into an objective visual medium, film. End of the Road is finally unsuccessful because of its often puzzling departures from Barth's novel, its inability to seamlessly graft the filmmakers's explicit political agenda onto a novel whose politics are, at best, implicit, and its failure to find an equivalent in its mise-en-scene for Jake Horner's essential narrational voice.

The End of the Road vs. End of the Road: The Perils of Adaptation

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A Cultural Approach to American Studies

John Barth's place in the world of contemporary fiction seems more precarious now than it has been for many years. While no one disputes his enormous gifts, almost everyone seems to have some complaint about the way he has managed them. For some readers it is the self-indulgence of sophomoric humor in Giles Goat-Boy (1966) that irks; for others it is the super-involuted preciosity of Chimera (1972) that distances; always it seems some sort of excess, books that are too long, too self-consciously postmodern, too insistent in their earthiness. Even his most recent attempt at the simpler, more accessible popular novel, Sabbatical (1982), failed to satisfy the critics, raising the familiar charges of overingeniousness, solipsism, and just bad taste.' Barth seems always to be pressing against the limits of his form, playing the line between tour de force and travesty, and while we may be engaged by his playfulness, we are discomfited by what is seriously at stake. Following the turns of his punning, analogizing wit, we begin to feel self-consciously anxious that we ourselves are his joke, our bewildered submersion in a network of self-canceling fictive codes his real subject. Here, as in so many places, Barth himself may provide us with the best explanation for his practice. In his much-quoted, and muchmisunderstood essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967), he speaks about our period as an "age of ultimacies, in everything from weaponry to theology. .. ." He cites Borges and Beckett as writers whose work "reflects and deals with ultimacy, both technically and thematically, as, for example, Finnegans Wake does in its different manner."2 It is this movement toward ultimacy that seems to be both the strength and the

The Paradigmatic Mind: John Barth's LETTERS

This article reads John Barth's novel The Tidewater Tales primarily as an adaptation, rather than a work of postmodern fiction. In making the process of retelling so central to the novel, Barth creates a self-conscious assessment of the “unnecessity,” and even impossibility, of originality. By appropriating legendary literary characters, Barth implicitly critiques the idea of genius that permeates both Romantic and modernist fiction. In contrast to previous critics, I argue that Barth's critique of the modernist aesthetic stems from a dissatisfaction with the movement's retention of the idea of the “single-author genius,” which stands in stark contrast to the cooperative relationship that exists between the storyteller and the audience.

An Interview with John Barth

Citations

“Scheherazade, c'est moi”: Narrativist mimesis and the principle of metaphoric means in John Barth

The End of the Road vs. End of the Road: The Perils of Adaptation

A Cultural Approach to American Studies

The Paradigmatic Mind: John Barth's LETTERS

Adaptation, Collaboration, and the Critique of Originality in John Barth's The Tidewater Tales

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