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What does it really mean, to know God? What are the grounds for knowing God, what feeds that knowledge, and what is really known? In his search for answers to these questions, in two panels the author paints for us a clear picture of what Calvin and Barth had to say about knowing God: Calvin against the background of pre-modern culture, Barth in response to a post-Kantian culture inclined to agnosticism. Between them, like a hinge between the two panels, we find the philosophy of Kant. The two epochal theological figures are placed next to each other, but without this being at the expense of the power of either. The study does not stop with detached historical analysis, but nourishes the author’s own reflection toward a systematic design.

Readership: All those interested in intellectual history, Reformed Theology, historical theology, systematic theology, pneumatology, sacramentology, Calvin and Barth. ... Read more

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John Barth’s eminence as a postmodernist is indisputable. However, much of the criticism dealing with his work is prompted by his own theories of "exhaustion" and subsequent "replenishment," leaving his writing relatively untouched by theories of postmodernism in general. This book changes that by focusing on the relationship between Barth’s aesthetic and the ideology critique of the historical avant-gardes, which were the first to mobilize art against itself and its institutional practices and demands. Examining Barth’s metafictional parodies in the light of theories of space and subjectivity, Clavier engages the question of ideology critique in postmodernism by offering the montage as a possible model for understanding Barth’s fiction. In such a light, postmodernism may well be perceived as a mimesis of reality, particularly a recognition of the collective nature of self and the world. ... Read more

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The six published volumes of fiction by John Barth are examined interpretively and historically through a comparison of published texts and unpublished manuscripts, in the light of interviews with Barth, his agent, and his editors as well as examination of several of Barth's unpublished essays and letters. The result is what Dr. Morrell calls 'the story of the stories, a kind of biography of fiction.' All of Barth's work, it is argued here, is based on the same general situation: his characters cannot reconcile themselves to the way things are, so they imagine alternatives by treating life as a kind of impromptu play in which they can assume any personality they wish. But recently, in Chimera, Barth shows signs of taking a much more optimistic attitude toward things: the characters no longer put on masks to face intolerable situations; instead they mask the situations. The book is illustrated with a photograph of the old showboat that inspired The Floating Opera, Barth's diagram called 'Adventures of the Hero' prepared while he was writing Giles Goat-Boy, the corrected first page of typescript for The End of the Road, Barth's map of Eben Cooke's adventures in Maryland for The Sot-Weed Factor, and the corrected first page of typescript for a story in Lost in the Funhouse. There also is a complete bibliography of writings by and about Barth. ... Read more