Barthes by Barth: Death, pleasure and an author. The middle and late novels of John Barth

This dissertation uses John Barth to re-examine the relationship between poststructuralism and Postmodernism. More than a dozen books and articles have tied John Barth to the works of Barthes, Derrida and company. I complicate the construction of a poststructuralist Barth. I initially discover a divided Barth in his nonfiction collection The Friday Book. While this text reveals affinities with Barthesian poststructuralism, it simultaneously constructs a conservative version of Postmodernism in many ways antithetical to poststructuralist theory. I argue that the same divided Barth inhabits his fiction in a variety of ways that lead one to view Barth at the intersection of two dominant theories of Postmodernism: one represented by Ihab Hassan and Jean Francois Lyotard, which incorporates many poststructuralist ideas, the other represented by Charles Jencks, Umberto Eco and others which rejects poststructuralism in favor of a more conservative "return to the center that could not hold." The notion of "the author" that emerges from my reading is not strictly speaking a Barthesian "dead" subject, but a divided subject, best understood through the paradigms created by Foucault or Bakhtin. It is not the death of the author but the proliferation of discourses and sites of authority that accounts for the displaced center I discover in Barth's texts.;At the same time, Barth's many statements regarding the erotics of fiction and his consciously constructed textual aporias lead me to contend that his real affinities with poststructuralism can best be seen through Roland Barthes' notion of pleasure. Barth's texts overtly advocate an art of pleasure and create a space within the problematics of presence and absence that in a way that compels the reader to become a reader of pleasure in order to survive the text. My conclusions bear on the construction of literary Postmodernism generally. Contrary to the school of thought of Jencks and Eco, I contend that texts like Barths cannot be well understood without recourse to poststructuralism. At the same time, I contend that these texts complicate and extend poststructuralist ideas. While my study looks at the whole of Barth's career, it concentrates on his most recent texts.