Джон Барт: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармашылығы

American writer (1930–2024)

John Simmons Barth (/b//ɑr//θ/; May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American writer best known for his postmodern and metafictional fiction. His most highly regarded and influential works were published in the 1960s, and include The Sot Weed Factor, a whimsical retelling of Maryland's colonial history; Giles Goat Boy, a satirical fantasy in which a university is a microcosm of the Cold War world; and Lost in the Funhouse, a self referential and experimental collection of short stories. He was co recipient of the National Book Award in 1973 for his episodic novel Chimera.

John Barth, called "Jack", was born in Cambridge, Maryland, on May 27, 1930. In 1947, he graduated from Cambridge High School, where he played drums and wrote for the school newspaper. He briefly studied "Elementary Theory and Advanced Orchestration" at the Juilliard School before attending Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B. A. in 1951 and an M. A. in 1952. His thesis novel, The Shirt of Nessus, drew on his experiences at Johns Hopkins. Barth married Harriet Anne Strickland on January 11, 1950. He published two short stories that same year, one in Johns Hopkins's student literary magazine and one in The Hopkins Review. His daughter, Christine Ann, was born in the summer of 1951. His son, John Strickland, was born the following year. His third child, Daniel Stephen, was born in 1954. In 1965, he moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught from 1965 to 1973. In that period, he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. Barth taught at Boston University as a visiting professor in 1972, then at Johns Hopkins University from 1973 until he retired in 1991 with the emeritus rank.

Barth's work is characterized by a historical awareness of literary tradition and by the practice of rewriting typical of postmodernism. He said, "I don't know what my view of history is, but insofar as it involves some allowance for repetition and recurrence, reorchestration, and reprise [ ] I would always want it to be more in the form of a thing circling out and out and becoming more inclusive each time." In Barth's postmodern sensibility, parody is a central device. Around 1972, in an interview, Barth declared that "The process [of making a novel] is the content, more or less."