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영어

In John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor the link between text and the world is reforged by intensification of textuality. Once history has been rendered into discourse, there is no longer any gap to be leapt between text and the world. When Barth returns to the origin of American history, he repeats it in a different way through the infiltration of fiction into history, and we only find chaos at the origin of American history. While historical document tries to create an ideological fantasy of an innocent American Adam, the blurring of history and fiction only makes the repressed return. The repressed turns out to be an American Adam as a rapist. But Barth does not argue that this is the only right version of early American history. To him both historical document and his own fictional text are simulacra whose originals have not existed. History is defined as sliding over these repeated simulacra.