Description
John Barth's lively, highly original collection of short pieces is a major landmark of experimental fiction. Though many of the stories gathered here were published separately, there are several themes common to them all, giving them new meaning in the context of this collection. As the characters search, each in his own way, for their purpose and the meaning of their existence, Lost in the Funhouse takes on a hiliarious, often moving significance.
About the Author
John Barth briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at Juilliard before attending Johns Hopkins University, received a bachelor of arts in 1951 and composedThe Shirt of Nessus, a thesis for a Magister Artium in 1952.He served as a professor at Penn State University from 1953. Barth began his career with shortThe Floating Opera, which deals with suicide, andThe End of the Roadon controversial topic of abortion. Barth later remarked that these straightforward tales "didn't know they were novels."The life ofEbenezer Cooke, an actual poet, based a next eight-hundred-page mock epic of the colonization of Maryland of Barth.Northrop Fryecalled an anatomy, a large, loosely structured work with digressions, distractions, stories, and lists, such as two prostitutes, who exchange lengthy insulting terms. The disillusioned fictional Ebenezer Cooke, repeatedly described as an innocent "poet and virgin" like Candide, sets out a heroic epic and ends up a biting satire.He moved in 1965 to State University of New York at Buffalo. He visited as professor at Boston University in 1972. He served as professor from 1973 at Johns Hopkins University. He retired in 1995.The conceit of the university as universe basedGiles Goat-Boy, a next speculative fiction of Barth comparable size. A half-goat discovers his humanity as a savior in a story, presented as a computer tape, given to Barth, who denies his work. In the course, Giles carries out all the tasks thatJoseph Campbellprescribed inThe Hero with a Thousand Faces. Barth meanwhile in the book kept a list of the tasks, taped to his wall.The even more metafictionalLost in the Funhouse, the short story collection, andChimera, the novella collection, than their two predecessors foreground the process and present achievements, such as seven nested quotations. InLetters, Barth and the characters of his first six books interact.Barth meanwhile also pondered and discussed the theoretical problems of fiction, most notably in an essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion," first printed in theAtlanticin 1967, widely considered a statement of "the death of the novel" (compare with Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"). Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing, and pointing to possible directions from there. He later (1979) a follow-up essay, "The Literature of Replenishment," to clarify the point.Barth's fiction continues to maintain a precarious balance between postmodern self-consciousness and wordplay on the one hand, and the sympathetic characterisation and "page-turning" plotting commonly associated with more traditional genres and subgenres of classic and contemporary storytelling.
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