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"My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue vanity, or either false or real naivete, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than some late-modernist marvels..." (pg. 203)

"Literature of Exhaustion"

vs.

"Literature of Replenishment"

by

John Barth

Literature of Exhaustion

vs.

Literature of Replenishment

By John Barth

Modernism

"...the special, usually alienated role of the artist in his society, or outside it..." (pg. 199)

"...foregrounding of language and technique as opposed to straightforward, traditional 'content'..." (pg. 199)

"In 1967 I set down my mixed feelings about the avant-gardism of the time in the following essay, first delivered as a Peters Rushton Seminars Lecture at the University of Virginia and subsequently published in the Atlantic. It has been frequently reprinted and as frequently misread as one more Death of the Novel or Swan-Song of Literature piece. It isn't. Rereading it now, I sniff traces of tear gas in its margins; I hear an echo of disruption between its lines. Its urgencies are dated; there are thin notes in it of quackery and wisecrackery that displease me now. But the main line of its argument I stand by: that virtuosity is a virtue, and that what artists feel about the state of the world and the state of their art is less important than what they do with that feeling. "

How does this fit in with the Beat Generation?

Postmoderism

"...a fiction that is more and more about itself and its process, less and less about objective reality and life in the world." (pg. 200)

How does this fit in with "The Babysitter"?

— The Friday Book, John Barth

"Literature of Replenishment"

"Literature of Exhaustion"

(Main Ideas)

  • What is modernism?
  • What is postmodernism?
  • The unimportance of labels.
  • The importance of clarity.
  • Literature isn't dead or dying.
  • So much as been done before, so much has been exhausted.
  • How do we move forward?
  • Jorge Luis Borges — "confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against himself to accomplish new human work." (pg. 69)
  • "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author." (pg. 72)

"....literature can never be exhausted, if only because no single literary text can ever be exhausted — its "meaning" residing as it does in its transactions with individual readers over time, space, and language."

— "Literature of Replenishment",

The Friday Book, John Barth

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