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Giles Goat-Boy is the fourth novel by the American writer John Barth, published in 1966. It is metafictional comic novel in which the world is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah who will....

The book was a surprise bestseller for the previously obscure Barth, and in the 1960s had something of a cult status. It marks Barth's leap into American postmodern Fabulism.

Blurfph
Barth wrote in "The Literature of Exhaustion" that The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy were "novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author".

Parody of the Bible;parody of full text of Oedipus Rex;text "discovered" by the author (like Vonnegut's Mother Night). "Taliped Decanus" 40 pages small type. Parodies both Sophocles and Freud.

The novel contains a forty-page parody in small type of the full text of Oedipus Rex called Taliped Decanus. The digressive play-within-a-book is grossly disproportionate to the length of the book, parodying both Sophocles and Freud.

Dante's Inferno==> Main detention, Campus Cantos

New Tammany College bears many resemblances, including a goat farm, to Penn State, where Barth was working when he began writing Giles Goat-Boy. Heavily funded by the governement during the Cold War, with an experimental nuclear reactor, military and scientific research and a "barn-sized" computer, as well as a "lavishly produced football program", Barth came to see the university as having expanded and diversified well past its roots.

Scientist named Eierkopf (German for "egghead").

Rather than discovering it, George chooses his identity, as did Ebeneezer Cooke in The Sotweed Factor.

Influnces
Barth seems drawn to the ??? of 17th century literature to deflate its own pretensions, as seen in works like Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Overview
One of Barth's most complex novels, it is considered by many to be Barth's best work, while... It marks Barth's full emergence as a metafictional writer. The metafiction manifests itself in the "Publisher's Disclaimer" and "Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher" which preface the book, and which each try to pass off the authorship onto another—the editors onto Barth, who claims it was by a mysterious Giles Stoker or Stoker Giles, who in turn claims it was written by the automatic computer WESCAC. The editors in the disclaimer present their opinions on whether or not to publish the book, the responses ranging from repugnance to revelation, some disparaging both the novel and its presumed author. The "author" JB, having ammended the book to an unkown extent, claims it has become accidentaly mixed up with a manuscript of his own, and the book is further appended with a "Post-Tape" and then a postscript, both potentially spurious, further undermining the authority of the author.

An allegory of the Cold War.

The humor and many events of the book are frequently in extreme poor taste, employing a number of potentially offensive representations of blacks, Jews and women. Even events such as the Holocaust are treated as material for frivolously absurd humor.

Plot
A manuscript, titled The Revised New Syllabus of George Giles Our Grand Tutor, is submitted to a publishing house by the author JB. He informs them that it has been given to him by the son of whom he believes is the author, but who claims it was compiled by an automatic computer. Various editors debate whether or not to publish the manuscript.

In the manuscript, a boy, raised as a goat but later educated as a man, comes to believe he will be the messianical Grand Tutor of his world. The world, conceived as a university, is divided into East and West Campuses following two Campus Riots, and is currently engaged in a Quiet Riot. The power of each Campus is control by giant computers, WESCAC and EASCAC, who have the power to EAT, or destroy the minds, of the students of either Campus. After his mysterious birth, the goat-boy is raised as a goat by the Moishian scientist Max Spielman, who regrets his part in having WESCAC EAT the Amaterasus at the end of Campus Riot II. When the goat-boy learns he is human, and gains insight into his unusual origin, He conceives of himself as the Grand Tutor, who will put an end to WESCAC's EAT program and teach studentdom the way to "pass" and not to "flunk". He sets out for his birthplace in New Tammany.

Giles soon finds himself involved with a number of people: the ... Anastasia, and her anarchic husband Maurice Stoker, who controls the Campus's power supply; Stoker's rival Harold Bray, who claims to be the true Grand Tutor; ... The goat boy, following the traditional pattern of a hero, must perform many tasks and pas many tests throughout the course of the story.

Style
In a complicated and roundabout way, the book takes the form of a bildungsroman, and makes virtuosic display of a number of literary techniques: parody, discussions, digressions, puns, bawdy comedy...

science fiction and the campus novel bildungsroman, allegory, romance, religious tract

George meets a character who is reading a thick novel, which turns out to be Giles Goat-Boy. The character is revealed to be reading the very scene in which the meeting takes place.

Language
As pointed out by the "Editor B" from the book's preface, Barth eschews the sort of language "which disappears in the storytelling", emphasizing that "language is the matter of his books".

Themes
The Cold War is parodied as a university campus, with representations of the US as New Tammany College, Asia as T'ang College, and Africa as Frumentia College. An electrified fence between East and West Campuses is the Berlin Wall. Following Campus Riot II (World War II), the University is plunged into a Quiet Riot (Cold War), and weapons developer turned pacifist Max Spielman mimics Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, the book questions and criticizes the social values that were dominant in the 1950s, the Cold War technological industrialism, and advocates a hippie-ish back-to-nature idealism (though this too is handled with irony).

The book also serves as a parody of the New Testament. Virginia Hector, like the Virgin Mary, miraculously conceives the novel's hero, insisting she has never "gone all the way" with anyone. She is raped by the computer WESCAC, and the child conceived is hunted by the Chancellor, as Jesus was by Herod. Virginia hides him away, to be raised as a goat in parody of the Lamb of God. George is a secondary Jesus, however, as the book already has its Jesus in the Shepherd Emiritus Enos Enoch, whom George imitates. Amongst the other Biblical figures parodied are Mary Magdalene, Pontius Pilate and John the Baptist.

George's story follows the pattern of the traditional hero, and as such he must perform several tasks and pass many tests. As the novel progresses, George comes to realize how the traditional conception of a hero has become irrelevant.

Background
Barth has worked most of his adult life as a university professor, and has also set The End of the Road on a university campus.

Barth tells how a reviewer of The Sot-Weed Factor saw in that book a parody of the pattern of the "Wandering Hero Myth", as described by Lord Raglan in The Hero (1936). This observation impelled Barth to begin research into comparative mythology and anthropology, which included reading Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Ritual Hero (1909; 1914) and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). This led to his deconstructing the idea of the Ur-Myth in Giles Goat-Boy. Barth would delve further into the Hero in his essay "Myth and Tragedy", and in his novels LETTERS (1979) and Once Upon a Time (1995).

In the 1987 preface to the novel Barth declared that his first three novels formed a "loose trilogy of novels", after completing which he felt ready to move into new territory. He called Giles Goat-Boy the first of his Fabulist novels, in contrast to the 1950s-style black comedy displayed in the earlier novels. He declared in a 1965 essay, "Muse, Spare Me", that he desired to be spared from social-historical responisibility in order to focus on aesthetic concerns. The Sot-Weed Factor was released in paperback the year before Giles Goat-Boat, and increased interest in his work shortly before Giles Goat-Boy was released.

Giles Goat-Boy was released the same year as a number of watermark works in the early history of postmodern American literature, most notably Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Brian McHale has seen 1966 as being a year in which the new postmodern aesthetic had definitively arrived, a year in which metafiction, poststructuralism and other concepts strongly related to postmodernism made their mark in the US.

Reception
On The New York Times bestseller list 1966 for 12 weeks, coldly received in England.

In a 1967 article, science fiction author Judith Merril praised the novel for its sophistication in handling sexual material.

Giles Goat-Boy was initially reviewed enthusiastically...by 1984, Robert Alter referred to it as "reced[ing] into the detritus of failed experiments in American fiction", calling it "little more than an inflated translation game"..."so brittle a cleverness that it constantly reveals the tediousness of the novel's informing conception". While it enjoyed a cult stus in the 1960s, it has since become one of Barth's least-read works. John Gardner called the book a morally "empty but well-made husk". Gore Vidal called it "a very bad prose-work", condemning it as one of a number of overly academic "teachers' novel[s]".

Barth's own statements on the primacy of aesthetics in his writing have tended to obscure the otherwise obvious politics (as 1960s Cold War allegory) in the book. Robert Scholes was among the early critics who dismissed the elaborate allegory as irrelevant, and critics since then have emphasized the rôle of the hero and the quest in the book's construction. In the 1980s, Barth would revisit his 1960s works and come to acknowledge their historical context, including in a preface to the 1987 edition of the Giles Goat-Boy.

Legacy
In 1967, after the success of Giles Goat-Boy, Barth was able to have released a revised one-volume edition of his first two novels that restored the books' original, darker endings.

Barth has come to see Giles Goat-Boy as "the first American postmodernist novel"—an assertion picked up by many of his critics and biographers, but not universally accepted. The novel was the central exhibit of Robert Scholes' The Fabulators (1967), a study of a tendency in contemporary writers to eschew realism in fiction.