Licenciatura en Lengua Inglesa

UTN
Literary Studies I
Teacher: Mariana Mussetta
Students: Bersia, M. Lucía
Raccone, Valeria
September 22nd, 2012
 GENERAL OVERVIEW
*The author
*“The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)
& “The Literature of Replenishment”
(1979)
*The Plot
*Characters
*Postmodernist & Metafictional traits
*Intertextual references
*Patriarchal society
*Conclusions
 John Barth

•John Simmons Barth (1930): American novelist and

short-story writer (postmodernist and metafictional
quality of his work).
•Degrees: B.A. in 1951 and M.A. in 1952 (John Hopkins
University).
•Professor at The Pennsylvania State University from
1953 to 1965.
•Professor at The State University of New York from
1965 to 1973.
•Boston University (visiting professor, 1972–73) and
Johns Hopkins University (1973–95) before retiring in
1995.
 “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)
& “The Literature of Replenishment”
(1979)
Barth talked about abandoning the “literature
of exhaustion” for a recognition of the
essentially parodic literature of
replenishment: the aesthetic recognition that
everything has always already been said before
and that parody “replenishes” through a self-
conscious recognition that implication in a
prior discourse does not entail exhaustion and
inert imitation. (Waugh 1)
 THE PLOT
Chimera: a 1972 novel composed of three connected
novellas: Dunyazadiad, Perseid and Bellerophoniad, whose
titles refer eponymously to the mythical characters
Dunyazad, Perseus and Bellerophon.
•Dunyazadiad: retelling of the framing story of Scheherazade, the famed
storyteller of the One Thousand and One Nights, by her younger sister
Dunyazadiad.
•The author, Barth himself, appears from the future and expresses his
admiration for Scheherazade and the 1001 Nights as a work of fiction,
of which she has no knowledge.
•Luckily for Scheherezade, he has appeared before her first encounter
with King Shahryar. As he sees that she does not know how she is going
to deal with the King yet, the author himself suggests the idea of
using a chain of interrupted stories to postpone her execution, and
offers to tell her a new story for the King every day. Taking the
author for a genie, Scheherazade agrees.
THE CHARACTERS

*Dunyazadiad

*Scheherezade

*The Genie (narrator)

*Sharyar

*Shah Zaman
 THEMES

*Patriarchy
*Reverse role
*Love and sex
*Feminism
*Importance of language
 POSTMODERNIST &
METAFICTIONAL TRAITS
According to Barth, the term POSTMODERNISM can be defined as:
” ackward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even
uninteresting new direction in the old art of story telling than on
something anticlimatic, feebly following a very hard act to follow.”
(qtd in Waugh 21)

“Metafiction is fictional writing which self-consciously and

systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to
pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.”
(Waugh 2)
• “Little Doony,” she said dreamily, and kissed me: “pretend this whole
situation is the plot of a story we’re reading, and you and I and Daddy and
the King are all fictional characters. In this story, Scheherezade finds a
way to change the King’s mind about women and turn him into a gentle,
loving husband. It’s not hard to imagine such a story, is it? Now, no matter
what she finds—whether it’s a magic spell or a magic story with the
answer in it or a magic anything—it comes down to particular words in the
story we’re reading, right? And those words are made from the letters of
our alphabet: a couple-dozen squiggles we can draw with this pen. This is
the key, Doony! And the treasure, too, if we can only get our hands on it!
It’s as if—as if the key to the treasure is the treasure!” (Bath 15-16)

•“Are you really Scheherezade?” he asked. “I’ve never had a dream so

clear and lifelike! And you’re little Dunyazade—just as I’d imagined both
of you! Don’t be frightened (…)” (Barth 16)

•I’m going in circles, following my own trail! I’ve quit reading and writing;
I’ve lost track of who I am; my name’s just a jumble of letters; so’s the
whole body of literature: strings of letters and empty spaces, like a code
that I’ve lost the key to.” (Barth 18)
•“You’re a harder critic than your lover,” the Genie complained, and recited the
opening frame of the Fisherman and the Genie, the simplicity of which he felt to be a
strategic chance of pace for the third night—especially since it would lead, on the
fourth and fifth, to a series of tales-within-tales-within-tales, a narrative complexity
he described admiringly as “Oriental.” (Barth 31)

•Narrative, in short—and here they were again in full agreement—was a love relation,
not a rape: its success depended upon the reader’s consent and cooperation, which
she could withhold or at any moment withdraw; also upon her own combination of
experience and talent for enterprise, and the author’s ability to arouse, sustain, and
satisfy her interest—an ability on which his figurative life hung as surely as
Scheherezade’s literal. (Bath 34)
•(…) he had gone forward by going back, to the very roots and springs of
story. Using, like Scheherezade herself, for entirely present ends, materials
received from narrative antiquity and methods older than the alphabet, in
the time since Sherry´s defloration he had set down two-thirds of a projected
series of three novellas, longish tales which would take their sense from one
another in several of the ways he and Sherry had discussed, and, if they were
successful (here he smiled at me), manage to be seriously, even passionately,
about some things as well. (Barth 36)

•“I don’t invent, “Sherry reminded him. Her voice was no less stead than his,
but her expression—when I got hold of my senses enough to see it—was
grave. “I only recount.” (Barth 37)

•He whished neither to repudiate nor to repeat his past performances; he

aspired to go beyond them toward a future they were not attuned to and, by
some magic, at the same time go back to the original springs of narrative.
(Barth 17)

•“My project,” he told us, “is to learn where to go by discovering where I am

by reviewing where I’ve been—where we’ve all been.” (Barth 18)
 INTERTEXTUALIT
Y
It is the relationship between texts, especially literary texts
(Oxford Dictionary)
•“Good lord!” the Genie cried. “Do you mean to say that you haven’t started
your thousand and one nights yet?” (Barth 20)

•“What others?” Sherry cried. “In which order? I don’t even know the Ali Baba
story! Do you have the book with you? I’ll give you everything I have for it!”
(Barth 21)

•“The author of The Thousand and One Nights doesn’t invent,” the Genie
reminded her; “he only recounts how, after she finished the tale of Ma’aruf
the Cobbler Scheherezade rose from the King’s bed, kissed ground before
him, and made bold to ask a favor in return for the thousand and one nights
‘entertainments. (Barth 38)
 PATRIARCHAL
SOCIETY
•Her second name (…)we chose in honor of our friend’s still-beloved mistress, whom
he had announced his intention to marry despite Sherry’s opinion that while women
and men might in some instances come together as human beings, wives and
husbands could never. (Barth 35)

•What are they saved for, if not a mere protracted violation, at the hands of fathers,
husbands, lovers? For the present, it’s our masters’ pleasure to soften their policy;
the patriarchy isn’t changed: I believe it will persist even to our Genie’s time and
place. (Barth 45)

•(…) Cut his bloody engine off and choke him on it, as I’ll do to Shahryar! Then we’ll
lay our own throats open, to spare ourselves their sex’s worse revenge. Adieu, my
Doony! May we wake together in a world that knows nothing of he and she! Good
night! (Barth 46)

•(…) “Let’s make love like passionate equals!” “You mean as if we were equals,”
Dunyazade said, “You know we´re not. What you want is impossible.” (Barth 62)
 CONCLUSIONS
“Dunyazadiad” is a metafictional work because

it is a work of fiction within a fiction;

the author is not only the writer of the story, but also a character;
it is a parallel novel which has the same setting , time period, and
many of the same characters as the 1001 Nights, but it is told from a
different perspective;
there are characters who express awareness that they are in a work
of fiction;
it emphasises the writing as being a creation, a construction, not
the representation or imitation of reality;
it reflects on the functions and construction of writing, reading,
rewriting, rereading, and interpreting.
 WORKS CITED
Barth, John. “Dunyzadiad” in Chimera. Fawcett Crest, 1972. Print.
Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of
Replenishment” in The Friday Book. John Hopkins University Press, 1984.
Print.
Waugh, Patricia. Postmodernism: a Reader. Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.
Waugh, Patricia. The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. Routledge,
Oxford Dictionary On line for Advanced Learners of English.
1984.
Print.