John Barth

John Barth ( born May 27, 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland) is an American writer. He is known for the postmodernist use of metafiktiven elements.

Life

Barth studied briefly elementary music theory and advanced orchestration at the Juilliard School before he went to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where in 1951 a Bachelor's degree (BA) and in 1952 the MA made. For this he wrote his final work, The Shirt of Nessus.

Barth was 1953-1965 Professor at Penn State University, from 1965 to 1973 at the University at Buffalo, 1972/73 Visiting Professor at Boston University, and eventually he taught until 1995 at the Johns Hopkins University before he became Professor Emeritus.

Literary work

Barth began his writing career with the novels The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. It involves conventional rectilinear told stories to the themes of identity, suicide and abortion, to which Barth nonchalantly remarked later: them "of did not know they were novels".

The Sot - Weed Factor is considered groundbreaking work in literary history. It is a 800 -page pseudo - epic of colonial Maryland, whose protagonist Ebenezer Cooke as Ebenezer Cook actually was a celebrated poet and has published a poem of the same title. The work consists of a conglomerate of loosely related parts, with digressions, interjections, stories within stories, and lists (such as a prolonged exchange of insulting profanity two prostitutes ). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke - several times as a " poet and Untouched " ( poet and virgin ) described - is an innocent through life walking man who has set a goal to write a heroic epic, and finally finds disillusioned that from a biting satire has become.

The following Barth's novel Giles Goat -Boy is created by a comparable extent and as speculative fiction. Here is the snobbery of the University is being targeted, which regards itself as the universe itself. It is a figure, half man and half goat that recognizes their humanity in the course of the story and becomes the savior in a university. John Barth pretends to have received the text as a computer-readable magnetic tape. Giles dissolves in the course of history all the tasks that are described in Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The following books, Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera were rather aligned more on metafiction and push the process of writing to the forefront of the action.

In 1970, prominent film starring Stacy Keach, Harris Yulin and James Earl Jones Barth novel ( The End of the Road) by director Aram Avakian as a movie drama. The film The Way into the abyss won the Golden Leopard Award at the Locarno International Film Festival.

Works

Prose

  • The Floating Opera ( 1957), it. L'opera galleggiante (1996 ), German Floating Opera (2001)
  • The End of the Road ( 1958), German I'm Jake Horner, I think (1983 ), recompiled as a day without weather (2002)
  • The Sot - Weed Factor ( 1960), dt The tobacconist
  • Giles Goat - Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966 )
  • Chimera ( three related stories ) ( 1972)
  • LETTERS: A Novel (1979 )
  • Sabbatical: A Romance (1982 )
  • The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987 )
  • The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991 )
  • Once upon a Time: A Floating Opera ( autobiographical novel ) ( 1994)
  • On with the story (stories) (1996 )
  • Coming Soon:! A Narrative (2001)
  • The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories ( 2004)
  • Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas ( three related stories ) (2005 )
  • Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011)

Non-fiction

  • The Friday Book ( 1984)

Secondary literature

  • Peter Freese: John Barth. In: idem: The American Short Story 1945 · · Salinger Malamud · Baldwin · Purdy · Barth. Athenaeum Verlag Frankfurt 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9, pp. 352-395.
Postmodernism Ebenezer Cooke (poet) End of the Road (1970 film) Name Authority File
443952
de