Donald Barthelme: The modernist underpinnings of a postmodernist fiction.

摘要

Though Donald Barthelme is one of the freshest voices in contemporary literature, it would be a mistake to consider him outside of the accepted continuum of twentieth-century literature. Barthelme is the logical extension, the heir apparent, of a literary tradition that can be traced back through Beckett and Nabokov to the modernists. Influenced by James Joyce, Barthelme constructs objects that are self-conscious.;Using the poststructuralist theories of several critics, this study examines four specific techniques of modernist and postmodernist textual production: fragmented text, the allusive method, the mythic method, and development of self-conscious ironic constructions. Constructions by both Joyce and Barthelme are used to illustrate this last technique.;To find a vocabulary for distinguishing Joyce's and Barthelme's use of textuality from that of other more traditional writers, the study reviews the critical tools developed by Carl Malmgren in Fictional Space in the Modernist and Postmodernist American Novel. Especially useful is his concept of fictional space. The study also reviews Roland Barthes' critical tools, emphasizing his explanation of the literary codes delineated in S/Z.;The study examines the textual innovations Joyce used in Ulysses to shift the novel's emphasis in its latter chapters from a primarily mimetic novel to a self-conscious literary object. Barthelme's short fiction is examined with an eye toward how he self-consciously uses the enabling codes of fiction to build his particular ironic fictive objects. The study shows how Barthelme's novel Snow White exploits the mythic impulse that informs the work of the great modernists.;The study examines The Dead Father, which concerns how one figuratively and literally defines one's relation to a father--especially if one's literary father is Joyce. This examination shows the difficulty contemporary writers face when trying to write authentically in the shadows of their own great dead fathers.;The study concludes that while Barthelme's work is new, it is still tied firmly to his modernist predecessors.