DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/DZ4J-J816
Defense Date
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Anthony Bryant Mangum
Second Advisor
Richard Fine
Third Advisor
Jason Coats
Abstract
This thesis examines the use of frame tales, genre blending, multi-voiced narration, and circular structure in John Barth’s 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales. It tracks the isomorphy of Barth’s general aesthetic project, set forth in his essays, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” “The Literature of Replenishment,” and “Very Like an Elephant: Reality Versus Realism,” onto the theoretical aesthetics of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Both Barth and Bakhtin praise the novel its omnivorous capability to accommodate, and juxtaposes conflicting genres against one another; they each see the novelist as an “arranger” or “orchestrator,” who reassembles pre-existing forms to make them “sound in new ways.” Using Bakhtin’s concepts of novelness, heteroglossia, and unfinalizability this essay works to present The Tidewater Tales as an active embodiment of the Bakhtinian worldview, which locates truth and knowledge in dialogue between two subjects. By aligning Barth’s novel with Bakhtin’s philosophy, which emphasizes intersubjective dependence between the I and the other, this essay seeks to work as a corrective rehabilitation of Barth’s writing, which has been maligned as solipsistic self-consciousness by critics such as John Gardner, Christopher Lasch, and David Foster Wallace.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-11-2022
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, American Literature Commons, Literature in English, North America Commons, Russian Literature Commons, Theory and Criticism Commons