The Negation Pattern In John Barth's "Exhausted" And Carnivalisque Parody In Chimera

John Simmons Barth(1930-)is considered as one of the most important and influential writers in American postmodern literature.In 1967,he published his most famous essay The Literature of Exhaustion in The Atlantics,and caused great controversies in the academic field.Henceforth,with great passions and efforts,Barth devoted himself into the research and the study of metafiction to find out the possibilities to overcome the crisis of "exhaustion".With his representative work Chimera,he won the "National Book Award" in 1973.Chimera is consisted of three novellas.Each of them is the retelling of an ancient mythology:One thousand and one Nights from Arabian mythology and the stories of Perseus and Bellerophon from Greek mythology.Domestic and international scholars have already analyzed and discussed this novel from the aspect of nihilism,feminism,aesthetics,metafictions and so on.Based on the theory of parody,this thesis focuses on the inner logic of parody and gives a closer introspection on the negation pattern of parody.The beginning of the thesis is the literature review which briefly introduces John Barth and his novel Chimera.The first chapter discusses basic concepts and characteristics concerning John Barth's parody and its dual nature of negation.Chapter two deals with the degradation of heroes and further exemplifies this pattern with the second novella Persied in Chimera;Chapter three uses the first novella Dunyazadiad to elaborate the pattern of centralization of the peripheral character;and the last part focuses on the dramatization and bathos of the original ending and analyzes this characteristic in the third novella of Bellerophoniad.It reaches to the conclusion that parody,as one of the most important narrative skills,is frequently used in metafictions.What's more,there is a striking negation pattern in Barth's "exhausted" and carnivalisque parody of rewriting the original text in the opposite direction.But with its dual nature and the carnivalisque nature of negation,his parody is not an absolute negation,but a positive and open one that regenerates through destruction.It no doubt exemplifies Barth's "exhausted" literary ideology and provides us with values and guidance for possible literary creation.