Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
II. International Symposium on Anglo-American Culture and Literature , Prof. Dr. Bülent Cercis TANRITANIR, Editör, IKSAD Publications, New York, ss.54-62, 2023
It is widely accepted that, in the post-war period, there has been a significant paradigm shift in the fields concerned with the emotional, social, and psychological aspects of human nature in the ways they perceive, understand, and represent it. These perceptual changes have been interpreted by many intellectuals as a result of the weakening of the modernist belief frames and the reconceptualization of humans’ place in the Universe. Literature, without any doubt, is one of these fields where important changes have taken place. Not only the conventional styles of literary genres have undergone great changes and become more unpredictable in the postmodern era, but the themes and the methods of representation for these themes have also shown notable variance. This paradigmatic shift in the perception of human existence has brought about a moral transition in it, as well. In this paper, it has been argued that John Barth, who is regarded as one of the cornerstones of postmodern fiction, reflected on this transition in his early works such as The End of the Road and The Floating Opera in a way that has helped this transition to take place. Barth’s novel The End of the Road has been critically analyzed to shed light on how he represented the transition from modernity to postmodernity. It has been suggested that Barth created allegorical characters to represent the moral perceptions of each epoch thereby delineating the transition from modernism to postmodernism via the development of his characters as well as the relationships among them.