![]() ![]() Moreover, the disruption of the axes bears narrative relevance in these works, demonstrating how nonlinearity can be an organizing principle. ![]() They employ various techniques of breaking the aforementioned linearities. The second part includes analyses of three distinctly nonlinear texts: Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’, Coover’s ‘The Magic Poker’ and finally Nabokov’s Pale Fire. What follows is a richly illustrated overview of methods of defying the above linearities. These axes can be subverted by multiplication and fragmentation. The first part of the thesis provides a theoretical framework in which three types of linearity – story, reading and transmission – are identified. Since the paradigmatic shift to the dominance of nonlinearity is still in progress, it is useful to examine texts that foreshadow the peculiarities of the approaching era within the limitations of print culture. ![]() In contrast to the generally internalized notions of coherent narrative, unchanging text, monolithic authorship and one-way flow of information suggested by printed works, the emergence of hypertext correspond to the ethos of fluidity, multivocality and interactivity. ![]() The appearance of digital technology radically altered the way we create, read and think of texts. The fictions to be studied or referred to here are selected texts from the writer's chef-d'oeuvre Lost in the Funhouse. Through the onion-folds of myth and the mirrors of his narrative funhouse Barth strives to replenish the traces of meaning long lost in the frames of writing and reality. The labyrinthine Barthian writing is shown here as making a heavy use of the scientific metaphor of entropy that, in Barth's canon, indicates the literary exhaustion. By so doing Barth revisits the Platonic cave to question and to further problematise the time-ridden notions of imitation, mimeses, and representation in his criti-fictional writing that self-consciously lays bare the props of realism's claims to reality and reality's claims to realism. It is intended here to show how in Barth's hands the narrative funhouse has become a narrative prison-house by him meshing together the typologies of fiction and labyrinth. This paper sets itself the task of approaching the shorter fictions of the postmodernist American writer John Barth. ![]()
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