Further Fridays

Book cover for 'Further Fridays'Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984-1994
272 pages.
Pictured trade paperback edition published by Little, Brown.
Buy now from Amazon.com.

Synopsis

Most notable in this collection is the essay “Postmodernism Revisited,” which continues the arguments Barth put forth in “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment” (both in The Friday Book). Also contains a somewhat modified version of the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme essay from Once Upon a Time.

Unfortunately, this volume is not the essential reading that the first Friday Book is. Barth has discussed most of his ideas and influences at length in both The Friday Book and Once Upon a Time.

My Capsule Review

Published in the Baltimore City Paper, 1995.

At 65, local literary superstar John Barth knows that he’s past his prime. While the fertile imagination from which sprouted Giles Goat-Boy and Chimera may still reap high-quality fiction, few readers these days seem to have the patience to tackle such ornate novels as The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. So in the time-honored tradition, Barth’s now at the phase of his career where he nudges the literary establishment for accolades and an enduring spot in the canon.

As brilliant as Barth may be, it’s still hard to believe the audacity of those folks at Little, Brown. Further Fridays, a compendium of Barth’s non-fiction writing during the past ten years, clocks in at a stunning $27.95. If you excise the chapters that aren’t already bookbound elsewhere (like the introductions to the Anchor paperback versions of his novels and the exegesis of the “Jack and Jill” poem from Once Upon a Time) or purely designed for a hard-core English theory audience in mind (the “4 1/2 Lectures”), you’re left with a pleasant afternoon or two of reading but little else. But please do at least borrow it from the library, if only just to read Barth’s engaging defense of the Gargantuan novel, “It’s a Long Story: Maximalism Reconsidered.”

Contents

  • Teacher
  • Can It Be Taught?
  • The Spanish Connection
  • The Limits of Imagination
  • A Few Words About Minimalism
  • It’s a Long Story: Maximalism Reconsidered
  • It’s a Short Story
  • It Goes Without Saying
  • Postmodernism Revisited
  • A Body of Words
  • Very Like an Elephant: Reality versus Realism
  • “Still Farther South”: Some Notes on Poe’s Pym
  • Kenosis: “I Think It’s Trying to Tell Us Something”
  • Borges and I: a mini-memoir
  • Once Upon a Time: Storytelling Explained
  • Goose Art, or, The Aesthetic Ecology of Chesapeake Bay
  • “Jack and Jill”: An Exegetical Aria
  • Browsing
  • Ad Lib Libraries and the Coastline Measurement Problem: A Reminiscence
  • Four Forwards:
    • The Floating Opera and The End of the Road
    • The Sot-Weed Factor
    • Giles Goat-Boy
    • Lost in the Funhouse
  • 4 1/2 Lectures: The Stuttgart Seminars on Postmodernism, Chaos Theory, and the Romantic Arabesque
    • 1. PM/CT/RA: An Underview
    • 2. Postmodernism Visited: A Professional Novelist’s Amateur Review
    • 3. The Arabesque
    • 4. Chaos Theory: Postmod Science, Literary Model
    • 4 1/2. PM/CT/RA: “So what?” or “Ah, so!”?
  • Inconclusion: The Novel in the Next Century
  • End-Note

Resources

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