Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of loosely connected short stories that was originally published by John Barth in 1968. These non-traditional stories examine the art of fiction writing, among other things, and seem to undermine the conventional and predictable nature of fiction. This article is in need of attention. ... John Barth John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work. ... 1968 (MCMLXVIII) was a leap year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1968 calendar). ... The Three Graces, here in a painting by Sandro Botticelli, were the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility in Greek mythology. ...
Instead, Barth presents a literary "funhouse," an almost nonsensical maze that weaves in and out of plot, narration, and traditional thought. A small maze. ... // Plot in literature, theater, movies According to Aristotles Poetics, a plot in literature is the arrangement of incidents that (ideally) each follow plausibly from the other. ... In fiction, a narrator is a voice or character who tells the story. ...
The book for which he is best known, however, is Lost in the Funhouse, a collection of short stories which most explicitly bears the influence of Borges.
"Lost in the Funhouse" is about a young boy named Ambrose who travels to Ocean City with his family and, while there, gets lost in a funhouse.
Reading Lost in the Funhouse changed the way I perceived writing and what was possible to achieve within the bounds of fiction.
Lost in the Funhouse is also fiction that imitates itself and "highlights the process which calls fiction into being" (Pearse 79).
"Lost in the Funhouse" presents an entirely different kind of intertextuality, one where the author refers to several other novels for a description instead of coming up with his own (or rewriting someone else's, as intertextual theorists say).
"Lost in the Funhouse" is also the beginning of the self-referential pieces in the center of the novel.
Feeds |
Contact