Giles Goat-Boy (or The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles our Grand Tutor) is a 1966 novel written by John Barth. It is a satire and allegory of the American campus culture of the time. A paperback edition was issued in Garden City, N.Y. by Anchor Books in 1987 with ISBN 0-385-24086-4 . It is centered on the hero, George Giles, and his rise from farm animal to Grand Tutor of the New Tammany College. His quest is singularly to be a hero, but the tale is a multifaceted one of his becoming. Numerous mythological and Christian allegories make his fate seem almost predestined, regardless of his innocence. Parallels to everything from the Cold War to 1960s academia to religion abound. A hypertext encyclopedia also figures into the novel, somewhat presciently given the 1966 publication. It contains a parody of Ernst Haeckel, as the character Max Spielman, with his insight "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", rephrased as "ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny" and "proctoscopy repeats hagiography";[1] and with The Riddle of the Universe rephrased as The Riddle of the Sphincters.[2]
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References
- Peter Mercer The Rhetoric of "Giles Goat-Boy" NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter, 1971), pp. 147-158 doi:10.2307/1345149
