Word: barthe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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GILES GOAT-BOY, by John Barth. An infinitely involved and dazzling fantasy cum parable about goatish (or maybe human) goings-on at an institution of lower learning that represents the modern...
...Travel Service arrangement that lets foreigners visit American families demonstrates a degree of hospitality that surprised many tourists. Rosemarie Barth, a West Berlin secretary, looked up acquaintances in Denver and reported that at once their friends "called me by my first name, which I liked very much." Language is always a barrier, but a Brazilian doctor says that his wife managed to spend $200 in a dress shop "on a total vocabulary of 'pink,' 'blue,' 'white,' 'my size' and 'how much.' " Other U.S. pluses, by consensus: ice cream, San Francisco...
GILES GOAT-BOY, by John Barth. A brilliant gothic fun-house fantasy of theology, sociology and sex in which a goat (or is it a boy?) appears as the Messiah of a new religion...
Anything Can Be True. Barth's parable is something like Dante's, a pilgrimage within an invented cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime...
...Barth has produced a black Bible that proceeds not to revelation but to further mystification. At bottom, he seems to be saying that even the bestial can be beautiful if the beholder believes it to be so. He faults man's failure to distinguish pragmatically between truth and belief. And, as in his earlier writings, he bleakly seems to say that anything can be true if it is in the nature of the believer to believe...