A brief history of my Barnes thesis (in anticipation of the upcoming thesis defense): When I first thought of doing graduate work in English (my original goal was to obtain a Ph.D. and become a professor), the author I thought I’d focus on was John Barth. I’d read three of his novels (his first three, I believe) and liked their combination of existentialist philosophy and postmodern literary technique (especially in The Sot-Weed Factor). I finally decided there had already been enough ink devoted to Barth. My next target was Graham Swift, whose Waterland is an amazing novel with many of the same themes I love so much in Barnes’ novels. But as I read the rest of Swift’s works, I found that the themes in Waterland didn’t seem to run through all of them, and I didn’t think I could write an entire thesis on only one novel.
Oddly enough, it was in a composition pedegogy class (jargon decoder ring: a course where you learn how to teach writing classes) that I found out about Barnes. One of our assignments was to write a lengthy paper about our first semester as English teachers (i.e. graduate assistants). Since I had been reading a lot of Marx at the time (a seminar in Marxist literary theory will do that to you), the essay I wrote flowed back and forth between a narative about my brightest student (my success story), a student who failed my course, and my own experience of doing something I cared about for a living (teaching writing) rather than what I’d always done before (made pizza). In this last bit, I used Marx’s concept of alienated and non-alienated labor. So the piece combined narrative and essay in a fairly uncommon way.
My friend James Katowich, who was also in that class, read my essay (at my request; he’s a fine proof reader) and said, “If you like this sort of thing, you’d love Junian Barnes’ novels.” He explained that Barnes’ novels spend a lot of time bluring distinctions between genres, especially the ones between story telling and essay writing. He loaned me his copy of Flaubert’s Parrot and I loved it so much that I read all of his other novels and decided to write my M.A. thesis about them.
As for just what it is that ties them together, I’ll refer you to the thesis itself, which I’ll post here soon (as soon as I finish defending it).