All articles tagged with #postmodernism
John Barth, the innovative postmodernist novelist known for his darkly comic and complicated novels, has passed away at the age of 93. His works, including "Giles Goat-Boy" and "The Sot-Weed Factor," challenged traditional literary standards and advocated for new approaches to literature. Barth, a writer's writer, was an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University and continued to write and publish into the 21st century.
John Barth, the influential American postmodernist novelist known for his darkly comic and innovative but complicated novels, has died at the age of 93. His works, including Giles Goat-Boy and The Sot-Weed Factor, challenged literary standards and advocated for new approaches to literature. Barth, a writer's writer, explored the relationship between storyteller and audience in his parodies and satire, drawing inspiration from The Thousand and One Nights. Throughout his career, he taught creative writing and received critical acclaim for his novels and short story collections.
Catherine Lacey's latest novel, Biography of X, is a postmodern work of experimental fiction that tells the story of a grieving widow who discovers that everything she thought she knew about her late wife, a fierce female artist who called herself "X," was false. The fragmented biography of X that the widow slowly assembles is shored up by footnotes and photographs, and includes real-life figures such as Patti Smith and Frank O'Hara. The novel is also a work of alternate history, in which post-World War II America divided into three sections. Despite its experimental genre-bending, the novel is structured in an old-fashioned way, via a Scheherazade-like sequence of stories.