| John Barth's professional life is comprised of three main activities conducted simultaneously from within academe: fiction writer, humanities and literature professor, and writing teacher. All three of these concerns inform and shape Barth's novels, each of which is a sort of Bildungsroman centering on a writer-protagonist who must confront reality through writing and written texts as a way to learn about the self and the nature of reality. Although this general situation characterizes all of his novels, little attention has been given to how this operates over the course of Barth's canon.;To examine this, I chart the course that Barth's novels take in regard to the situations faced by his writer-characters as they work to negotiate the world, at times even to control the world, through learning to use writing and written texts in various ways, from exploring epistemological and cosmological assumptions to recreating themselves and the world. But more important, Barth's writer-characters come to learn about the limits that writing encounters when used to make sense of the self and the world; they all come to understand that writing, both as act and artifact, undermines truth as much as it creates it. |
