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The Literature of Exhaustion
作者Author  /  John  Barth  約翰.巴斯

The Literature of Exhaustion

 
 
[quotes and the critics' comments]

"By 'exhaustion' I don't mean anything so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities--by no means necessarily a cause for despair. (64)
 

  • His examples: Beckett, Borges and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
[Borges: "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"]
. . . like all of Borges's work, it illustrates in other of its aspects my subject: how an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work -- paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what had appeared to be his refutation (71). 
  • his own novels as examples
. . .novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author (72).
  • labyrinth
A labyrinth, after all, is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice (of direction, in this case) are embodied, and -- barring special dispensation like Theseus's -- must be exhausted before one reaches the heart.  
   
Related Links
  Literary Criticism Databank: Postmodernism and Urban Space
N. American Postmodern Fiction & Film, Spring 2000
Postmodern Theories and Texts
  Fall, 1998
 
   
 
   
     
     
 
   
 
   
 
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