LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 14:10 October 2014
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

HOME PAGE

Click Here for Back Issues of Language in India - From 2001

BOOKS FOR YOU TO READ AND DOWNLOAD FREE!

REFERENCE MATERIALS

BACK ISSUES

  • E-mail your articles and book-length reports in Microsoft Word to languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.

  • PLEASE READ THE GUIDELINES GIVEN IN HOME PAGE IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE LIST OF CONTENTS.

  • Your articles and book-length reports should be written following the APA, MLA, LSA, or IJDL Stylesheet.

  • The Editorial Board has the right to accept, reject, or suggest modifications to the articles submitted for publication, and to make suitable stylistic adjustments. High quality, academic integrity, ethics and morals are expected from the authors and discussants.

Copyright © 2014
M. S. Thirumalai
Custom Search

An Analysis of Barth’s Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction
as a Metafiction

Dr. Abdulmomin Al-Rubaiee
Ibb University, Yemen


Courtesy: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/people/fellows/barth.html

Abstract

The present article analyzes John Barth’s meta-fictional short story entitled “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction”. The direct monologue of the story is the story of his life, which dialogues directly with his father – the writer – and the reader. Unlike conventional autobiographies which narrate the developmental (procedural) course of the narrator (self-consciousness), Barth’s story concentrates on and deconstructs such dichotomies as narrator/story and writer/reader. Contra responsive to other meta-fictions which mainly challenge the authorial voice, this “self-begetting” story targets the reader and destabilizes his/her writer-like performance. The paper draws on the theories of meta-fiction posited by Patricia Waugh as well as the narrative notions of Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck. Besides, Bakhtinian dialogism is deployed in order to show the inter-discursive quality of the story’s texture.

Key words: John Barth, autobiography, meta-fiction, deconstruction, Bakhtinian dialogism

Introduction

John Barth is the American postmodern novelist and short story writer. Lost in the Funhouse (1963) is his collection of fourteen short stories which most blatantly deconstructs the conventions of short story. Barth’s experimentations with the genre of novel, short story, and language have led many critics to take him as a writer of meta-fiction. Comparatively, Barth’s novels have been the point of interest with most critics and only some have turned their attention to his short stories. Those who have written about his short stories have generally addressed his collection as a single entity, resituating it within Barth’s narrative enterprises. A critic like Charles A. S. Ernst (2004) takes Lost in the Funhouse as the manifestation of the writer’s biographical concourse. Ernst mainly works on the story titled “Night-Sea Journey” and shows how this story stands as the text-world and life-text of the author. Similarly, Evelyn Glaser-Wohrer (1977) argues this collection bears autobiographical traits. W. Todd Martin treats this collection as a novel, relying on Barth’s own note at the beginning of the 1981 edition where he states it is “neither a collection nor a selection, but a series . . . to have been meant to be received ‘all at once’ and here arranged”. (1981, p. vii) Alan Lindsay, likewise, numbers the collection among Barth’s novels. (1995, p. 3)

Metafictionality

Although the stories of Lost in the Funhouse share some basic postmodern and meta-fictional features, each cherishes its own meta-fictional status. The present analysis is concerned with “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” in order to achieve two objectives. First, the paper approaches the story as a meta-fiction; second, there is an attempt to pinpoint that unlike most meta-fictional stories, “Autobiography” targets the reader and his/her active role and thereby implicitly restores the author to the text. The main argument is that “Autobiography” deconstructs not only Barth’s but also the reader’s authorial voice, hence Bakhtinian dialogism.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. Abdulmomin Al-Rubaiee
Ibb University
Yemen
momin355@gmail.com
Custom Search
  • Click Here to Go to Creative Writing Section

  • Send your articles
    as an attachment
    to your e-mail to
    languageinindiaUSA@gmail.com.
  • Please ensure that your name, academic degrees, institutional affiliation and institutional address, and your e-mail address are all given in the first page of your article. Also include a declaration that your article or work submitted for publication in LANGUAGE IN INDIA is an original work by you and that you have duly acknowledged the work or works of others you used in writing your articles, etc. Remember that by maintaining academic integrity we not only do the right thing but also help the growth, development and recognition of Indian/South Asian scholarship.