FROM REALISM TO POSTMODERNISM: METAFICTIONAL GAMES AND STRATEGIES IN JOHN BARTH'S THE SOT-WEED FACTOR

<p>This paper examines John Barth’s novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) as an emblem of early American postmodernism with specific focus on its metafictional strategies. Written as an seventeenth-century pastiche, the novel follows and satirizes the naïve poet Ebenezer Cooke and his blind devotion to literary classics during his voyage from England to the colonial Maryland. The analysis of Barth’s playful engagement with self-reflexivity and historiographic metafiction is approached primarily through theoretical concepts of Patricia Waugh and Linda Hutcheon. Barth’s metafictional game starts with mocking and parodying of exhausted and conventional literary forms of earlier traditions, such as realism, in an attempt to renew narrative possibilities and to question the role of art/literature as well as the human need to narrativize. By constantly blurring the boundaries between “the real” and “invented” events, Barth’s historiographic metafiction deconstructs historical records, e.g. colonial narratives, as subjective narratives and fabrications used to perpetuate domination and exert power. With the analysis of The Sot-Weed Factor as a narrative game and a critical reflection on the limits of historical knowledge, the aim of this paper is to illustrate that Barth’s metafictional strategies do not only exemplify postmodernist aesthetics but also inquire into the relationship between truth, history, and narrativization/literature.</p>