Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter;… - John Barth

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Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what might be done differently, what's a story anyway, and what is to be found in the existing inventory of situations, attitudes, characters, tonalities, forms, and effects accumulated over four thousand years of written literature.

John Barth

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About John Barth

John Simmons Barth (May 27, 1930 – April 2, 2024) was an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work.

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Native Name: John Simmons Barth

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Robertson Davies Randall Jarrell Umberto Eco Northrop Frye John Banville

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The Romantics enthusiastically and optimistically rejected neoclassical forms; the Postmodernists are just as likely to embrace such forms, although the embrace is seldom unskeptical or unironic, however impassioned it may be underneath its coolness.

Our ability to experience life may be more or less limited by inexperience of art as well as vice versa, since each tends to increase the wattage of the great illuminator of both — namely the imagination.

A book is what gets me off: something with heft to it, that you can take in two hands and spread like a woman. Mnyum!

Life teaches the storyteller his themes and subject matter; literature teaches him how to get a handle on them: what has been done already, what migh… - John Barth

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