John Barth is dead. He was the cult writer of postmodernism

Is dead John Barth, cult writer of postmodernism. The American writer had 93 years old, died Tuesday, April 2, in a retirement home in Bonita Springs, Florida. The announcement was made by his wife Shelly Barth at New York Times and relaunched by Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was professor emeritus of English literature and creative writing.

Barth is the pioneer and representative of a literary season that has put traditional narrative, the classical division into genres, the so-called novel, into crisis. Postmodernist theorist, Barth subverted the rules in his work and wrote very cultured and often riverless metaliterary novels, where he mixed styles and languages ​​with irony. Intricate, imaginative, labyrinthine works. He is among the authors who influenced David Foster Wallace.

Two of his essays, The Literature of Exhaustion e The Literature of Replenishmentfrom 1967 and 1979 respectively, are considered among the fundamental theoretical writings of postmodernism.

The works

Among his best-known books, of a very large production, is his debut The Floating workoriginally published in 1957 and then revised in 1967 (in Italy it was published by Longanesi in 1968, then published, like his other works, by minimum fax): we are in Maryland, the theater of many of his narratives, where a bourgeois man, a lawyer, who shares a threesome with a friend and his wife one day he gets up and contemplates suicide. Again a love triangle will be at the center of his second novel, The end of the roadprotagonist an antihero who cannot live: a pastiche philosophical in which he mixes satire and desperate nihilism (it came out in 1958, published for us by minimum fax, after the Rizzoli and Bur editions). Two years later his symbolic novel arrives, The Maryland Farmer, is based on the life of a poet, Ebenezer Cook, who wrote a poem of the same title: 800 pages, translated in Italy by Luciano Bianciardi; an epic that looks to eighteenth-century masterpieces such as The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman by Laurence Sterne e White by Voltaire.

In the following years he published the grotesque Giles goat-boy (1966) and then the stories of The house of joy e La Chimera with which he won the National Book Award in 1973: a literary game starring Scheherazade’s sister and the Greek heroes Perseus and Bellerophon.

In the new millennium he continues to write, even if postmodernism is no longer at the center of the scene, indeed it suffers attacks in the name of a renewed realistic and novelistic vocation. Among the titles, not translated into Italian, the most recent is Every Third Thought. A Novel in Five Seasons (2011). His non-fiction production also continues: it dates back to 2012 Final Fridays. In Italy minum fax has recently published Algebra and the fire. Essays on writing (2010) e Life is another story. Selected stories (2010).

The life

John Barth was born on May 27, 1930 in Cambridge, Marylandtogether with a twin sister, Jill: a circumstance that is anything but negligible in the writer’s career, if it is true that in more than one of his works allusions are made to pairs of twins.

As a young man his passion was music: he jazz. And this explains the passion for improvisation and a certain literary free style. He tries to be an amateur drummer, but then falls back on a journalism faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Dal 1965 al 1973the years of the war in Vietnam and of student protests, teaches at State University of New York a Buffalo.

He returned to live in Maryland and taught at the school from the 1970s to 1995 Johns Hopkins University in Baltimoreof which he had become professor emeritus.