John Barth

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John Barth

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

Life

Barth briefly studied elementary music theory and advanced orchestration at the Juilliard School before going to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore , where he received his bachelor's degree (BA) in 1951 and an MA in 1952. For this he wrote his thesis The Shirt of Nessus .

Barth was a professor at Penn State University from 1953 to 1965 , from 1965 to 1973 at the University at Buffalo , from 1972 to 1973 visiting professor at Boston University , and finally he taught at Johns Hopkins University until 1995 before he retired .

Literary work

Barth began his writing career with the novels The Floating Opera and The End of the Road . These are conventionally straightforward stories on the subjects of identity , suicide and abortion , to which Barth later nonchalantly remarked: they “didn't know they were novels”.

The Sot-Weed Factor is considered to be a groundbreaking work in literary history. It is an 800 page pseudo-epic from the colonial days of Maryland, the protagonist of which Ebenezer Cooke wasactually a celebrated poetas Ebenezer Cook and published a poem with the same title. The work consists of a conglomerate of loosely connected parts, with digressions, interjections, stories within stories and lists (like a prolonged exchange of insulting vulgar expressions between two prostitutes). The fictional Ebenezer Cooke - described several times as " poet and virgin " - is an innocent man who has set himself the goal ofwritinga heroic epic , and finally, disaffected, realizes that it is a biting satire has become.

Barth's next novel, Giles Goat-Boy , is of a similar size. Here the arrogance of the university is targeted, which regards itself as the universe itself. It's about a figure, half human, half goat, who in the course of the action recognizes its humanity and becomes the “ savior ” in a university. John Barth claims to have received the text as a computer-readable magnetic tape. In the course of the story, Giles solves all the tasks that were already described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces .

The following works, Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera , were even more oriented towards metafiction and put the process of writing into the foreground of the plot.

In 1970, Barth's novel (The End of the Road) by director Aram Avakian was made into a prominent film drama starring Stacy Keach , Harris Yulin and James Earl Jones . The film The Path into the Abyss won the Golden Leopard Award of the Locarno International Film Festival .

Because of the frequent use of fantastic elements in his works, for example in Giles Goat-Boy or The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor , Barth also appears in relevant literature, for example the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction .

Awards

Works

prose

  • The Floating Opera (1957), it. L'opera galleggiante (1996), German The floating opera (2001)
  • The End of the Road (1958), German I am Jake Horner, I believe (1983), newly translated as Days without Weather (2002)
  • The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), German The tobacco dealer
  • Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966)
  • Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (Stories) (1968)
  • 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 (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)
  • Further Fridays (1995)

literature

  • Peter Freese : John Barth . In: ders .: The American short story after 1945 · Salinger · Malamud · Baldwin · Purdy · Barth . Athenäum Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 1974, ISBN 3-7610-1816-9 , pp. 352-395.
  • Dieter Schulz: John Barth . Martin Christadler (ed.): American literature of the present in single representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 412). Kröner, Stuttgart 1973, ISBN 3-520-41201-2 , pp. 371-390.
  • Max F. Schulz: The Muses of John Barth: Tradition and Metafiction from Lost in the Funhouse to the Tidewater Tales . Johns Hopkins University Press 1990, ISBN 978-0-8018-3979-5 .
  • Heide Ziegler : Irony is a must. John Barth and John Hawkes. Forms of consciousness of the American contemporary novel . Winkler University Press, Heidelberg 1995, ISBN 978-3-8253-0248-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Clute : Barth, John. In: John Clute, Peter Nicholls : The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 3rd edition (online edition), version dated April 4, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Barth, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barth, John Simmons
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 27, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Cambridge, Maryland , USA