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John (Simmons) Barth |
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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 still paint nudes." This statement reflects his preoccupation with form and content: he is both a brilliant innovator of narrative structure and a mesmerizing storyteller. To use Robert Scholes's term, Barth is a "fabulator" who revels in weaving elaborate yarns. Often, as in The Sot-Weed Factor and The Floating Opera , Barth ironically imitates the conventions of past literary periods. In other fictions, like Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera, he solves the problem of exhausted narrative possibility by writing about that problem itself. Throughout Barth's works, intricate frame devices enclose complicated plot structures filled with mythic allusions, philosophical rhetoric, and ribald wordplay. In a recent interview, Barth offered this literary credo:
As a writer ...
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