From the Paper
"This study will describe and compare the main characters in John Gardner's October Light, John Barth's The Floating Opera, and Philip Roth's The Counterlife. The study will consider the ways the protagonists in these novels deal with reality, life, death and suicide. Essentially, the study will argue that, despite the differences in the lifestyles, philosophies, and personalities of the three protagonists, they are finally quite comparable in terms of the ways they relate to life and death. The differences remain, but at heart each of the main characters have a cynical, skeptical, absurd, or otherwise generally negative attitude toward reality and life, and each of them are struggling in various ways to arrive at some perspective which would allow them to, at the very least, be more accepting of life and death."

Abstract
Thispaper examines the stories "Lost in the Funhouse" and "Echo" by John Barth. The purpose of the paper is to explore how identity and meaning of life are portrayed in both. It takes the particular position that Barth's understanding of our self-perception is one which is built upon lies created to protect our selves from being discovered.

Abstract
This paper explains how Margaret Atwood's "Lady Oracle" and John Barth's "The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor" are both concerned with a mythical and psychological search for identity. More specifically, the paper explains that in both books we come across characters that are searching for a sense of identity through various means-usually by adopting new roles.

From the Paper
"Since Joan knows them all, she also understands that what became of school dancers and other hot-shots. Most of them turned into tired wives and badly needed escape just the way she did. "Escape literature ... should be an escape for the writer as well as the reader" (p. 155) Escape was something Joan sought through her identity as a writer because she felt that writing could enable her to understand just who she was just the same way her audience could benefit from her work: "Escape wasn't a luxury for them, it was a necessity. They had to get it somehow. And when they were too tired to invent escapes of their own, mine were available for them at the corner drugstore, neatly packaged like the other painkillers" (p. 34). Joan also feels her writing did not only have a palliative effect but could indeed turn women like herself into what they desired to be. She felt her books had the "the power to turn ... pumpkins to pure gold." By offering "a vision of a better world, however preposterous" (p. 35), Joan was only embarking on a voyage of self-discovery."

Tags:joan, foster, comic, looking, who, what, love, worth, seeks, development, escapes

Abstract
The paper shows that both novels, "Notes from Underground" by Dostoevsky and "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Barth relate to the central theme of realism. The paper analyzes other similar central themes of both books as well as analyzes the main characters.

From the Paper
"Consider what each character truly desires. Both fundamentally want to fit in and be normal, and it is the impossibility to achieve this that alienates them so completely. Underground Man goes to dinner to impress the other men. He wants to be respected and admired and, basically, accepted the way in which other people are. At dinner, however, he can only be rude and embarrassing, thus further ensuring that every attempt he makes actually worsens his position. Ambrose "imagined himself years hence, successful, married, at ease in the world, the trials of adolescence far behind him." He, too, does not romanticize his seat of alienation or his marginal status. He wants what he understands to be regular; he wants to enjoy the Funhouse, but he cannot."

Tags:Ambrose, anger

Abstract
This paper studies how the novel went from an early state of what is now referred to as pre-novel, such as the work of Daniel Defoe, all the way to post modern work, such as "The Sot-Weed Factor" by John Barth. The novel changed, evolved, grew and reflected the society reading it from its birth. This paper looks in depth at the causes for its rise, its moment of perfection and its change into alternative form such as modernism and post-modernism.

Table of Contents:
"Robinson Crusoe" and the Beginning of the Novel
The Capitalism and Secular Values of "Robinson Crusoe"
Changing Times as Seen in "Moll Flanders"
Form and Function of the Novel in "Moll Flanders"
The Reader's Identification with Moll
The Characterization of "Moll Flanders"
Criticism of Defoe as a Novelist
"Tom Jones" and the Progression of the Novel
The Prefaces of "Tom Jones"
"Emma" and the Height of the Novel
The World Surrounding "Emma"
Female Authority and Readership in "Emma"
Character in "Emma"
"The Sound and the Fury": the Modern Novel
Character in "The Sound and the Fury"
Form of the Novel Altered in "The Sound and the Fury"
"The Sot-Weed Factor" and the Introduction of Postmodernism
Character in "The Sot-Weed Factor"
Conclusion: The Novel's Trajectory

From the Paper
"The novel as we know it today began perhaps three centuries ago, when works began to surface that were not easily categorized into previously known literary forms. There had been true life accounts, political treatises and poetry, but nothing quite like a fictional story told from either first or third person, which defied the unities of time and place and was something to be read in more than one or even two sittings. In fact, in the early pre-novel period, works such as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders were actually presented as true life accounts to the readers, perhaps as a means to ease them into this new and undefined form of literature. As the novel grew in popularity, authors such as Henry Fielding were beginning to not only structure the novel into chapters and books, but were also defining the form of the narrative and dictating its conventions right in the context of his novel, as we will see later in this paper. By the time Jane Austen was writing, novels had reached a place of comfort and understanding in the eyes of the readers, if not always in the eyes of scholars. She helped introduce this growing and flourishing genre to women, as well as helped refine the form of the novel. Later authors such as William Faulkner took what was known as the novel and changed it forever, adding multiple viewpoints and jumps in time and space that defied not only the unities but conventional timelines as well. Then, in what we now call the postmodern era, authors like John Barth wrote texts that took a look at the constructs that novels previously worked with and exploded them. The intent of this paper is to look at the rise of the novel: its growth into the form we commonly refer to today as "the novel", its stabilization, and its change into alternative forms of novel such as modernism and postmodernism. I will look closely at each of the above authors, showing how each contributed to this now widely read form of literature."

Tags:Providence, Xury, Friday

Abstract
This paper discusses the criticism of Roland Barthes as applied to the photographic image and the concepts of the stadium and the punctum as they help explain the effect of an image on the viewer. The paper then applies them to two images from John Szarkowski's book "Looking at Photographs," suggesting where Barthes may not fully explain the way photographs reach the viewer and how they carry meaning.

From the Paper
"The photographic image has been described as a momentary capturing of reality, based on the false dictum that the camera never lies. In truth, the camera may lie, and it may alter "reality" in the process of capturing it. Critic Roland Barthes has written extensively on the meaning of the image and on how the image achieves its effects on the viewer, and so how the image conveys meaning. Meaning can also be imposed by the viewer, and the process is not always easy to sort out by those who want to know which came first. The concepts offered by Barthes will be discussed first, followed by an application of them to two images from John Szarkowski's book Looking at Photographs."

Tags:barthes, image, photography

Abstract
This paper examines how these three novels focus on some of the same points having to do with the responsibility of the writer to his subjects as well as to the current and future audiences of their work. It stresses one theme that runs through each of the works is to what extent does telling the truth empower the writer to get away with hurting people.

From the Paper
"This relative nature of truth is most dramatically underscored by Gardner, who reminds us that every heroic tale leaves out the tears and terrors of the victims of that heroism. Beowulf forms the very edge of literary consciousness in historical terms for speakers of English. It is our literary bedrock in many ways. Gardner fundamentally disrupts that sense of bedrock by asking us what if Beowulf does not tell us the truth? What if this is not a heroic epic but a tale of the slaughter of the innocents?"

Tags:future, responsibility

From the Paper
"General Observations
This essay explores the various concepts of existentialism as found in the following six works: The Floating Opera (John Barth); The Stranger (Albert Camus); The Idiot (Fyodor Dostoyevsky); The Castle (Franz Kafka); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche); and Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre). These six existentialist writers embrace several viewpoints, a situation which proves existentialism is not a philosophy or a definite school of thought. Most of these existentialists are not even in agreement concerning essentials. It is possible for one existentialist to be a Christian, while the other may be an agnostic or even an atheist. Perhaps the one characteristic all of these thinkers share is their individualism.


Abraham Kaplan states: "Existentialism, moreover, is a..."

From the Paper
"The purpose of this research is to examine the literary style of minimalism in contemporary short fiction. The plan of the research I will be to set forth the origins and characteristics of minimalistic literature as a response to previous modes of literary style, and then to discuss the principal practitioners of narrative minimalism. In particular, reference will be made to the style, themes, plot development, and symbology contained in various short works of Ann Beattie, who is viewed as perhaps the foremost minimalist author. As appropriate, comparisons of Beattie's work will be made to the work of other minimalistic writers, with a view toward offering an assessment of the position and strength of the movement.

The literary style known as minimalism attained currency from 1970 onward, and has been both lauded and attacked as a ... "

Abstract
This paper presents a claim for the inclusion of Katherine Mansfeld's work in today's literary canon. This is based on her influence on contemporary writers of minimalist short fiction such as John Barth, Beckett, Raymong Carver, Ann Beattie. The paper also includes biographical material on Mansfield.

From the Paper
"Katherine Mansfield was born in New Zealand in ... but emigrated to England in the closing years of the Edwardian period for the purpose of completing her education and making her reputation as a writer. After graduation from Queens College, London she had an indifferent beginning as a writer. Her life was complicated by multivaried liaisons, an unwed pregnancy, a brief marriage to a man who was not the father and a stillbirth. In apparently demoralized and disillusioned and at the instigation of a mother who wished to confer order..."

Tags:Katherine Mansfield, literary, minimalist, fiction, western canon