John Barth's “Once Upon a Time”
Fiction or Autobiography?
Abstract
John Barth's innovative aesthetics is based mainly on the premise that literary conventions are likely to be transcended or subverted "to generate new and lively work". Little wonder, then, that writing the story of his life he has chosen to disguise it in the form of a novel. Once Upon a Time (and no title could better indicate this intention), structured as it is on a double voyage through space and time, blatantly interweaves fact and fiction in the conviction that the meaning of one's life, like that of history in general, can better be attained only if reality is interspersed with imagination. Given the affinities between Barth's poetics and postmodern modalities of consciousness, this essay comes to the conclusion that Once Upon a Time, more than a fiction, is in fact a perfect example of what can be defined as a typical "postmodern autobiography".
Copyright (c) 1995 The Author(s)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
RSAJournal applies a CC BY-NC-ND license to all its contributions. This license enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. CC BY-NC-ND includes the following elements:
- BY: credit must be given to the creator.
- NC: Only noncommercial uses of the work are permitted.
- ND: No derivatives or adaptations of the work are permitted.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights for their submissions to the journal.
- Authors grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License that allows others to share unedited work for non-commercial purposes with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
