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- Title
John Barth and David Foster Wallace: An Abortive Patricide.
- Authors
Ziegler, Heide
- Abstract
David Foster Wallace initially saw himself as a late postmodernist; indeed, he literally wrote a text in the margins of his copy of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Later on, probably under the influence of Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, he wanted to become one of those "strong poets" who need to commit a literary patricide so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. What has been more or less overlooked so far (or perhaps simply taken for granted, given the widespread recognition and influence of Creative Writing Seminars in the U. S.) is that Wallace used the model of teacher and student to create his own relationship between Author and Reader, turning the story into a battleground between them. This essay attempts to show that Wallace's "homicidal" as well as "fawning" attitude towards Barth actually raises the status of the author he means to succeed.
- Subjects
WALLACE, David Foster, 1962-2008; BARTH, John, 1930-; PARRICIDE; CREATIVE writing; TEACHERS
- Publication
Anglia: Journal of English Philology / Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie, 2019, Vol 137, Issue 3, p449
- ISSN
0340-5222
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ang-2019-0039