"My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiated nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false nor real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by my definition and my judgement) as Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing or Nabokov's Pale Fire. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace - not to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterates. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art"

Source: John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment, Postmodernist Fiction", The Atlantic, January 1980, pp. 65-71. quoted in Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. pp. 9. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.