For Heide Ziegler, John Barth is a central figure in the postmodernist literary movement, his development representative of the evolution of twentieth-century narrative modes. Rather than emphasizing experimentalism, Ziegler offers a persuasive reading of Barth's fiction as structured upon the principle of paradox, and reliant on the parody mode. The rupture between art and life thus emerges as less significant in the fiction than the internalized conflict between an authorial impulse for innovation and the respect for tradition, a phenomenon envisaged as a father/son conflict which parody mirrors. Ziegler identifies as a recurrent feature of the fiction a concentration, each time in a pair of complementary novels, on a particular genre which is reaffirmed. Drawing her terminology from the two best known of Barth's literary essays, she describes the first novel of each pair as "exhausting" the genre in question, the second as transcending or "replenishing" it. More generally, she proposes a development across the sequence of paired novels, which at first focus ever more narrowly on the author as artist, later broadening out to envisage the artist as representative of mankind. Within the scope of a short study there are obvious advantages to such a schematic approach. Ziegler's intellectual clarity on the subject of such a complex writer is to be welcomed, and her discussion reveals her, throughout, as a highly sophisticated critic. Suggestiveness is sacrificed, however, to the construction of a clear argument. In some respects the approach is too much that of popular postmodernist mechanics. The reader gains little sense of the pleasures of the texts from Ziegler's dispassionate tone and cool analysis. Such areas as lucidity, comedy, and eroticism are strictly subordinated to more ratiocinative concerns, creating an overall impression of Barth as an intensely cerebral novelist, more to be studied than enjoyed.

John Barth (Contemporary Writers)

Ziegler, Heide

Literature & Fiction

Routledge

The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition: Interviews with English and American Novelists

and Bigsby, Christopher, Editors

Junction Books

John Barth (Routledge Revivals)

John Barth represents most completely what has been termed postmodernism, not because his work comprises more postmodernist features than other contemporary writers but because, for Barth, "life" and "art" are two sides of the same coin.  In this brief study, first published in 1987, Heide Ziegler examines all Barth’s novels. She argues that each pair of novels first "exhausts" and then "replenishes" those literary genres that hinge on a particular world view: the existentialist novel, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, or the realistic novel. Through the division of labour between character and author Barth manages to develop a new mode of literary parody which projects itself beyond the mocked literary model and even self-parody into the realm of future fiction.  This book is ideal for students of literature and postmodern studies.

History & Criticism

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