In his short story collection Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth attempts to deal with the existential plights that fictional writing and human beings are faced with."Title", the most postmodern story in the c...In his short story collection Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth attempts to deal with the existential plights that fictional writing and human beings are faced with."Title", the most postmodern story in the collection, centers on the issue of"filling in the blank,"in which Barth leads readers to solve the problem and create the story with him. To examine Barth's postmodern experiment in"Title", this paper mainly focuses on the following three questions: what is the"blank"? How to fill in it? Why to fill in it in that way? By answering them, we may see how Barth reconciles the conflict between the urgency of"filling in the blank"and the failure of filling them.展开更多
文摘In his short story collection Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth attempts to deal with the existential plights that fictional writing and human beings are faced with."Title", the most postmodern story in the collection, centers on the issue of"filling in the blank,"in which Barth leads readers to solve the problem and create the story with him. To examine Barth's postmodern experiment in"Title", this paper mainly focuses on the following three questions: what is the"blank"? How to fill in it? Why to fill in it in that way? By answering them, we may see how Barth reconciles the conflict between the urgency of"filling in the blank"and the failure of filling them.