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 exper...

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 st...

In Palimpsests, Gerard Genette argues that all literary texts are inevitably hypertextual (1997: 1). The author defines "hypertextuality" as one of the five types of transtextuality or textual transcendence embracing all possible kinds of relationships between texts. The hypertext, as it is suggested...

Most teachers of Early American Literature devote considerable time and energy to contextualizing (or intertextualizing) the poems, tracts, relations, narratives, and sermons on the syllabus. For good reason, Americanists have moved away from justifying the teaching of early texts by referring continually to...

For a dozen years I have been trying to read The Sot-Weed Factor. I have never entirely completed this astonishingly dull book but I have read most of John Barth's published work and I feel that I have done him, I hope, justice. There is a black cloth on my head as I write. First, it should be noted that Barth … is a professional schoolteacher. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing. He is extremely knowledgeable about what is going on in R and D [Research and Development] land and ...