Fall 2024 OLLI Digital Catalog

John Barth’s Novel: the Floating Opera (H321)

H – Literature

This is a hybrid course. One section meets on site at the location listed; and one section meets online only.

Detailed class discussion of Barth’s astonishingly inventive, seemingly absurdist first novel, a bleakly comic accounting by a garrulous first-person narrator who has awakened to the bright idea of committing suicide at day’s end. Admission is free to our protagonist Todd’s operatic spectacle, so come one and all to see whether his show ends with a bang or a whimper. Please have completed an initial reading of the novel by the course’s first meeting date. Students may use any edition of the novel from or after 1967. Required text: The Floating Opera, John Barth, ISBN 0-38-507630-4

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This offering meets for a total of 11 session(s).

INSTRUCTOR: William Zak

ZAK, WILLIAM–Ph.D., English literature, University of Michigan; M.A., Lehigh University; B.A., Boston College. Retired from a 30-year teaching career in the Department of English of Salisbury University. Author of several books on Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, Greek tragedy, and, most recently, a study of Robert Frost’s major poetry, published in 2022 by Lexington Books.

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