In a writing career that spans five decades, John Barth has established himself as the premier writer of the postmodern novel in America. Perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, Barth has managed to combine consistently cutting-edge formal...

John Barth has taken what he considers the moribund genre of the traditional novel and has revived it with a series of imaginative and inventive "fictions." Barth writes, "If I were a painter, I would attempt to be as contemporary as Frank Stella, and...

James Joyce is a major influence on the work of John Barth, reflected in Barth's use of irony, satire, and his own personal character involvement in his fiction. Both authors use elaborate schemes as plot devices, as Barth does in 'Giles Goat-Boy' and 'The...

Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 396 pp. $26.00. Coming Soon!!! opens with a variation on the classic message-in-a-bottle motif employed by Barth throughout his career: the discovery by Ditsy, a transgendered progger, of a computer disk, waterproofed inside three Ziploc bags, containing an e-novel,...

American car shoppers are a fickle bunch.They're worried about gas prices and are loath to buy the largest SUVs. But they haven't embraced hybrids fully either.At the same time, U.S. automakers are reeling from rising costs and fierce competition from overseas companies. It spells production...

In the following essay, Bradbury discusses the fiction of John Barth, finding that the author uses self-reflexive techniques to comment on American culture.

It is striking … to see how much Barth's fiction has been moving toward the fulfillment of an idea—the idea being the repudiation of narrative art…. That is the paradox of Barth's novels: they are about paralysis, they seem even to affirm paralysis, yet they have more narrative energy than they know what to do with. (pp. 95-6) Each [of Barth's four first novels] is generally longer, wilder, more ambitious, more outrageous than its predecessor, and at the core of eac...

The theme of interior disorder and illness caused by a division between human faculties which naturally complement each other in the act of knowing is, of course, a common one in Western literature; a certain vein of that literature, however, which extends to us from the satires of a Syrian Cynic named Menippus, takes this theme as its primary obsession. Thus we must place Giles Goat-Boy among the works of that vein, including The Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Praise of Folly, Don Quixote, Gulliv...