SOURCE: "Postmdernism and Barth and the Present State of Fiction," in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 60-72.

In the following essay, Bradbury discusses the fiction of John Barth, finding that the author uses self-reflexive techniques to comment on American culture.

It is a commonplace of postmodernist fiction that it contains within itself a degree of self-reflection and selfreference. Indeed, the absence of these elements from more recent departures within the development of, particularly, American fiction has led to claims for the rise of a new realism within the genre. The irony of this change is that it has been contemporaneous with the development of a poststructuralist criticism which has as one of its major projects the disassembly of classic realist texts into their component writerly parts.

In the manner of his writing, if in no other, John Barth has resisted the tides of 'conservative realism' as they...