Further Fridays: Essays, Lectures, and Other Nonfiction, 1984-94

Think post-modernism is something for stuffy literature professors? Think again. Among the more than twenty essays that John Barth tackles, none is more enlightening than his exhoneration of the most maligned literary term of the decade. Barth addresses his essay to a well-read audience and convinces us that regular-guy readers can enjoy post-modern literature as surely as Persians enjoy "The Arabian Nights." He takes the postition that the label of post-modernism is just that, a label, and that it's practitioners (himself among the vanguard) are members of a generation that can no longer pressume their audiences are naive--twentieth century readers know archetypes and plot devices when they see them. Barth does not, however, try to convince the reader to embrace post-modernism; rather, he simply explains it as he understands it. With a similarly laid-back, take-me-as-I-am tone, Barth tells of how he met his wife, how he learned to write, what he thinks imagination is, and what the virtues and vices of short stories are, among numerous other topics. Also included in this, his second volume of "Friday" essays (named for the day of the week in which he takes a sabatical from teaching), are the prefaces to four of his most popular works. This is an enjoyable intellectual feast for anyone interested in the writer's art--even if you didn't major in English.