If John Barth’s first two novels reopen the wound left by the disenchantment of the world—the need for meaning amidst nihilism—then his third, 'The Sot-Weed Factor' (1960), tries to dress it. Disenchantment frees the self from the limits of custom and tradition on the one hand, but robs it of a scale of values by which to orient its conduct on the other; once all such scales are deemed equally valid and thus equally arbitrary, they can only be adhered to by the cynical, the stupid or the self-stupefied. In a climate of confused values, the imposter emerges as the hero of the post-heroic age. Barth’s early work was coupled with the existentialism at large in the 1950s and the paradoxical quest for myth in demythologized modernity. The new myth centres on the self, at once ontologically empty and mimetically full. The agency of narrative art in Sot-Weed is quixotic, or so I contend in this paper.

A review of Failed Frontiersmen: White Men and Myth in the Post-Sixties American Historical Romance, by James J. Donahue

Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote is one of the earliest and most influential novels in the history of Western literature. John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, published almost three centuries later, can be considered as one of the most seminal postmodern novels ever written in the English language. The goal of this paper is to examine Cervantes's influence on John Barth in particular and in American postmodernism from a more general point of view. For the Spanish genius' footsteps on American postmodernism, a deconstructive reading will be employed. Consequently, concepts such as deconstruction of binary opposites, the role of the subaltern or how the distinction between history and story are paramount to both Cervantes and Barth will be used.

That one ought to live like an artwork is the ideal of Gilbert Osborn in Henry James’ 'Portrait of a Lady,' the false aesthete who would escape moral judgement in the pose of beauty’s faithful admirer. John Barth’s 'End of the Road' picks up the theme, but in a first-person narrative that struck admirers and detractors alike as a manifesto on the sovereignty of art. The distance between author and hero is preserved, however, by virtue of the dialogical character of the novel, which challenges the narrator’s radical scepticism about the possibility of morality in a world of diverse impulses that never add up to an answerable self. The sceptical idea that the self is merely a performative construct, for example, summons on stage the idea of the self as a bearer of normative commitments. The relation of the moral to the aesthetic in the novel is clarified with reference to Kierkegaard’s 'Either/Or' and Bakhtin’s theory of selfhood.

Taking Jennifer Egan’s novel Look at Me (2001) as an exemplary case study, this article explores what it means for contemporary writers to “begin with postmodernism” in responding to post-60s US culture and society. The argument brings together two recent developments in literary culture: the historicist and revisionist turn taken by scholarship on literary postmodernism, and the direct engagement by younger US fiction writers with the historical genealogy of the postmodern era.