John Barth’s On with the Story: Stories and the Transformation of American Postmodernist Poetics

“Endings, endings everywhere; apocalypses large and small.” It is with this subtle rhythmic allusion to a classical masterpiece Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that John Barth, theoretician and practitioner of American postmodernism, starts his latest book On with the Story: Stories 1996 . The booklength story opens by creating an ironic situation of the “Last Lecture,” with the writer meditating wittily on current theories forecasting the death of postmodernism, these “apocalypses large and small” 15 , and on all types of “endisms”—from the end of the artist to the end of the world. He is afraid, as John Keats was, that “he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain” 16 . The writer’s new claim is “to rebegin” 14 . And this is not only a linguistic joke.

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