One of the most playful voices of postmodernism is gone

Annapolis. John Barth, the playful and erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and sparked countless debates about the art of fiction, has died at age 93.

Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was professor emeritus of English literature and creative writing, confirmed his death in a statement, which occurred on Tuesday.

Along with William Gass, Stanley Elkins, and other colleagues, Barth was part of a wave of writers in the 1960s who challenged standards of language and plot. He is the author of 20 books, including Giles Goat-Boy (Giles, the goat-boy) y The Sot-Weed Factor (The tobacco planter), Barth was a university writing professor who advocated postmodernism in literature saying that the old forms had run out of steam and new approaches were needed.

Barth’s passion for literary theory and his innovative but complicated novels made him a writer’s writer. Barth said that he felt like Scheherazade in Arabian Nightsdesperately trying to survive by creating literature.

In 1966 he had a bestseller with Giles Goat-Boywhich turned a university campus into the microcosm of a world threatened by cold War and with a hero who is part goat.

The following year, he wrote a postmodern manifesto, The Literature of Exhaustion (The Burnout Literature), who argued that the traditional novel suffered from a wear in certain ways. The influential essay of Atlantic Monthly described the postmodern writer as someone who He faces an intellectual dead end and uses it against himself to carry out a new human work..

He clarified in another essay 13 years later, The Literature of Replenishmentwhich did not mean that the novel was dead, but rather that it urgently needed a new approach.

I like to remind erring readers of my previous essay that literature is in fact about 4,500 years old (more or less, depending on one’s definition of literature), but that we have no way of knowing if 4,000 500 years constitute senility, maturity, youth or mere childhoodwrote Barth.

Barth frequently explored the relationship between narrator and audience in parodies and satires. He said that he was inspired by Arabian Nightswhich he discovered while working in the classics library at Johns Hopkins University.

It is a quixotic tightrope act to expect, at this point in the 20th century, to write literary material and deal with declining readership and a publishing world where companies are owned by other companies.dijo Barth a The Associated Press en 1991.

Barth studied jazz at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but discovered that he did not have a great talent for music, so he turned to creative writing, a craft he taught at Pennsylvania State University, SUNY Buffalo, the Boston University and Johns Hopkins.

His first novel, The Floating Opera (The floating opera), was nominated for a National Book Award. It was also proposed again by a 1968 short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse (Lost in the haunted house), and won in 1973 for Chimera (Chimera), three short novels focused on the myth.

His revelation work was The Sot-Weed Factor from 1960, a parody of historical fiction with a multitude of plot twists and bawdy hijinks. The sprawling picaresque story uses 18th-century literary conventions to chronicle the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke, who takes possession of a tobacco farm in Maryland.

Barth was born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and set many of his works there. Both his 1982 book Sabbatical: A Romance (Sabbatical) as their The Tidewater Tales from 1987 feature couples sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.

Barth also challenged literary conventions in his 1979 epistolary novel Letters (Letters), in which the characters of his first six novels wrote to each other, and he also inserted himself as a character.

My ideal postmodernist author does not limit himself to repudiating or imitating his modernist parents of the 20th century or his premodernist grandparents of the 19th century. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back.

Barth continued writing into the 21st century.

In 2008, he published The Develop-ment, a collection of stories about retirees in a nursing home. Final Fridayspublished in 2012, was his third collection of essays.