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Mazari, Rachida. "Donald Barthelme : étude de nouvelles." Paris 10, 1998. http://www.theses.fr/1998PA100052.
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Cette etude developpe une typologie qui prend en consideration quatre-vingt-quinze nouvelles de donald barthelme. Seize categories sont considerees. Pour commencer, cette typologie regroupe les histoires par theme en quatre divisions. La premiere division rassemble des nouvelles qui traitent de l'identite ou du concept du moi d'un personnage fictif. La deuxieme consiste en des histoires qui representent l'echange ou le conflit entre deux moi dramatises dans un dialogue. La troisieme division regroupe des nouvelles d'une societe du moi qui focalisent sur la relation de l'individu a la societe, de son integration, mais aussi de son alienation. La quatrieme comprend les histoires dans lesquelles un objet du paysage physique - un ballon ou une montagne de verre - devient le sujet d'une description pour les utilisations de cet objet dans la societe. Dans chacune des divisions, les nouvelles sont divisees de facon croisee en quatre classes fondees sur l'utilisation de ces themes par donald barthelme. Dans la premiere classe, l'auteur nous semble jouer avec le moi, le dialogue, la societe et les objets dans le paysage. Le jeu de donald barthelme ressemble a celui de la decouverte par un enfant, de l'exploration ou de l'evasion d'un objet qu'il trouve dans son environnement. Son enjouement, perceptible dans le ton facetieux du narrateur ou dans les libres actions du protagoniste, est une energie mentale qui pousse continuellement les objets et provoque les antagonistes qu'elle rencontre. Dans une deuxieme classe, donald barthelme est absorbe par la connaissance, la perception ou par l'etablissement d'une certaine forme de comprehension relative a tous ses objets. Cette activite devient une autre maniere de distinguer les nouvelles de barthelme par les processus qui se deroulent dans ces histoires. La troisieme classe examine les nouvelles ou le moi, le dialogue, la societe ou les objets physiques sont pieges, retournes sur eux-memes, et forces de repeter les memes actions de facon obsessionnelle, sans changement ni renouveau. La quatrieme classe comprend les histoires dans lesquelles donald barthelme ou ses personnages creent un moyen de s'evader de tels cycles de repetition.
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Abramowitz, Rachel I. "Donald Barthelme and 'Not-Knowing', 1964-1987." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:c183d6a9-86f9-4337-b6c5-4efdc6dc0731.
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This thesis argues that Barthelme's major 1985 essay "Not-Knowing" contains within its title Barthelme's central artistic idea, and that not-knowing informs both the subject of his fiction and his philosophy of art. This study will be the first critical treatment of Barthelme that positions his work from beginning to end in terms of the dimensions of not-knowing that came out of his own reading in psychology, art theory, philosophy, religion, and education, offering coherent readings of content and suggesting the ways in which content relates to form. The Introduction explores the origins of Barthelme's ideas of not-knowing, paying special attention to the influence of Mallarmé, Joyce, and Beckett on Barthelme's first characterisations of not-knowing, creativity, and reception. The first chapter gives an in-depth reading of Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme's first collection of stories. Though Barthelme had not yet begun to formally theorise his ideas of not-knowing, they were already latent in Come Back, Dr. Caligari's characterisation of psychological experience, specifically in relation to anxiety, boredom, and interpretation. The second chapter looks at the ways in which Harold Rosenbergâs theories of the visual arts, and especially collage, which Barthelme encountered while co-editing Location magazine with Rosenberg in the early 1960s, address form and not-knowing, and how Barthelme treats these issues in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (1971), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), and Amateurs (1976). The third chapter shows how Barthelme's university studies in 19th century philosophy, especially Kierkegaard in The Concept of Irony (1841) and Kierkegaard's treatment of Schlegel in that treatise, inform his concern with irony, both in theory and practice, in City Life (1970), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Chapter Four argues that Kierkegaard's theories of education and religion in Either/Or (1843) and The Present Age (1846), as well as the contemporary incarnation of Dewey's ideas of progressive education, both had a profound influence on Barthelme's ideas about the way a society is educated into knowingness, the artist's aspiration toward not-knowing, and the validity of religion in the postmodern world. The conclusion to the thesis reexamines the Introduction's argument about literary influence through a brief reading of The Dead Father (1975). Barthelme is recognised as one of the most important American postmodernist writers, and yet there has been relatively little critical treatment of his oeuvre. The major books that address Barthelme's work, which include Jerome Klinkowitz's Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (1975) and Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition (1991), as well as Alan Wilde's Horizons of Assent (1981) and Stanley Trachtenberg's Understanding Donald Barthelme (1990), belong to a two-decade span of classifying writers such as Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth using a limited set of ideas about postmodernism that were interesting as theory at the time, but did little to explore the actual literary, philosophical, and aesthetic content and contexts of these writers' works (with the possible exception of Pynchon). This thesis aims to rescue Barthelme from now-hackneyed ways of talking about postmodernism, which include lumping various aesthetic techniques under the rubric of "metafiction," claiming that the era's sole interest is in surface at the expense of depth, and that the dependence upon clichés is a deliberate expression of artistic exhaustion.
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Chaskes, Daniel. "Beyond fragmentation : Donald Barthelme and writing as political act." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42480.
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“Beyond Fragmentation: Donald Barthelme and Writing as Political Act” extracts Barthelme from recursive debates over postmodernism and considers him, instead, within the intellectual contexts he himself recognized: the avant-garde, the phenomenological, and the transnational. It is these interests which were summoned by Barthelme in order to develop an aesthetic method characterized by collage, pastiche, and irony, and which together yielded a spirited response to political phenomena of the late twentieth century. I argue that Barthelme was an author who believed language had been corrupted by official discourse and who believed, more importantly, that it could be recovered through acts of combination and re-use. Criticism influenced by the cultural theory of Fredric Jameson has frequently labeled Barthelme’s work a mimesis of an age in which meaning had become devalued by rampant production and consumption. I revise this assumption by arguing that Barthelme’s work reacts to what was in fact a stubbornly efficient use of discourse for purposes of propaganda, bureaucracy, and public relations.
Drawing on the biographical material available, and integrating that material with original archival work, I uncover the specific sources of Barthelme’s political discontent: Watergate, the war in Vietnam, a growing militarization in the United States, and the ideological rigidity of the 1960s counterculture. In three biographical chapters I connect these concerns to Barthelme’s novels and short stories, which represent attempts to create avant-garde objects that might challenge the specific rationalities (the commonality of violence, for example) political action is premised upon. I show Barthelme inserting political subject matter into texts alongside a formal apparatus that suggests the way such matter had been misconceived and misrepresented, often with horrific consequences. In two chapters of close reading, I first read the short story “Paraguay,” from City Life (1970), as a critique of American neo-imperialism in Latin America. In that piece, Barthelme explores the dual ways--official and cultural--a homogenizing American influence is felt abroad. Next, I compare Barthelme to author and activist Grace Paley, whose story collection Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) provides revealing context for Barthelme’s own political interventions.
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Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. "Ethics in postmodern fiction Donald Barthelme and William Gass." Heidelberg Winter, 2002. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?id=2679709&prov=M&dok_var=1&dok_ext=htm.
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Schwerdtfeger, Barbara. "Ethics in postmodern fiction : Donald Barthelme and William Gass /." Heidelberg : Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb39279602x.
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Sierra, Nicole Marquita. "Literature, architecture, and postmodernity : Donald Barthelme and J.G. Ballard." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:909bff3c-6eea-46a6-9c7f-72d52b9d43ee.
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Focusing on works between the 1960s and the early ’80s, this thesis sets the literature of Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) and J.G. Ballard (1930–2009) within the context of twentieth-century architectural theory and history (written), design (drawn), productions (built), professional practice (managed), and pedagogy (taught). The primary aim of this study is to explore the discursive exchange between literature and architecture, while probing the putative association between postmodernity and architecture. By introducing a broader set of social phenomena into debates about postmodernity, my thesis enables a revaluation of how the architectural idiom is interpreted in literature. Using textual and visual analysis, this thesis argues that Barthelme’s and Ballard’s literary works operate at an intersection of the visual arts and mass media. Responding to American and European twentieth-century visual avant-gardes and socio-cultural transformations, architecture participates in the formulation of avant-garde conceptual frameworks. Critically, architecture is not only an aesthetic discipline; it is also a social discourse. Through the discipline’s alignment with ‘new’ and ‘old’ avant-gardes, Barthelme and Ballard use architecture as a point of creative departure to undertake formal and thematic literary experiments. For both authors, contact with the architectural avant-garde has literary consequences. This thesis considers four interconnecting ways literature and architecture ‘speak’ to each other: representation, discourse, formal comparisons, and influence or inspiration. Within my study these topics are examined through critical meditations on architecture from geographical (Fredric Jameson, David Harvey), architectural (Robert Venturi, Charles Jencks) and visual cultural (W. J. T. Mitchell, Marshall McLuhan) sources. Also figuring prominently are epitextual materials, especially archival documentation from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston and the Papers of J. G. Ballard collection at the British Library. This thesis opens up new ways of understanding the interart pluralism that characterises the postmodern.
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Maltby, Paul. "Dissident postmodernists : Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon /." Philadelphia (Pa.) : University of Pennsylvania press, 1991. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb35701930x.
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Lukavičiūtė, Julija. "Minimalizmas Donald'o Barthelme'o romanuose." Master's thesis, Lithuanian Academic Libraries Network (LABT), 2005. http://vddb.library.lt/obj/LT-eLABa-0001:E.02~2005~D_20050614_105204-26053.
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The thesis aims at the analysis of Donald Barthelme's two novels "Snow White" and the "Dead Father". The analysis of the selected novels was focused on demonstration of the characteristics of postmodern minimalism such as fragmentation, collage technique, and language games. The introduction of the thesis reveals the link between the selected literary trend and the socio-cultural medium that influenced the development of postmodern minimalism in literature.
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De, Zwaan Victoria. "Postmodern pirates, metaphoric experiments in the novels of Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kathy Acker." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1996. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/NQ28164.pdf.
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Bauer, Sylvie. "Métafiction et jeux de langage dans le roman américain contemporain : (Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme, Russell Hoban)." Paris 10, 1995. http://www.theses.fr/1995PA100153.
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A partir des romans de Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme et Russell Hoban, cette étude tente de déterminer les rapports entre métafiction et jeux de langage, et d'en dégager les enjeux, tant sur le plan de la fiction que de l'écriture ou du langage. La première partie s'intéresse plus particulièrement aux problématiques de la mise en abyme, aux enjeux de miroirs, d'abord au niveau de la fiction, puis de l'écriture, enfin du langage. On montre comment ces jeux de miroirs fonctionnent, et quel est le rapport qui s'établit entre mise en abyme et métafiction. La seconde partie est plus particulièrement consacrée aux jeux de langage, ce qui implique à la fois une définition du jeu et des règles qu'il implique, et une étude du concept de 'jeu de langage' formule par Wittgenstein. On montre comment ce qui est en jeu dans l'écriture réflexive, c'est le langage. Cela implique une tentative de définition du langage, jeu qui implique des règles et des frontières qui sont sans cesse franchies. Cette partie porte un intérêt particulier aux monstres du langage, effractions des règles et autres exceptions. La troisième partie s'intéresse aux enjeux du langage, c'est-à-dire au rapport entre le langage et le monde. A partir des romans, on tente de montrer comment c'est le langage qui construit la réalité, et comment toute réalité est une construction du langage<br>Through the analysis of the novels written by Walter Abish, Donald Barthelme and Russell Hoban, this study tries to determine the relations between metafiction and language games, and to bring out what is at stake in such relations, be it on the level of fiction, writing and language. The first part is more particularly concerned with the problematic of mise en abyme and mirror-games, first on the level of fiction, then on the level of writing, and on the level of language. This section shows how those mirror-games work, and what is the relation between mise en abyme and metafiction. The second section deals with language-games, which implies defining the idea of a 'game' and the rules games entail. It also implies a study of Wittgenstein's concept of 'language games'. What is at stake in narcissistic writing is language, which implies to try and define language, as a game with its rules and its frontiers that are always transgressed. This section deals more particularly with the monsters of language. The third part is more particularly interested in the relations between language and the world, in what is really at stake in language. With those novels as a starting point, this section tries to show that language and language alone builds reality, and that reality is a contruction of language
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三浦, 玲一, та REIICHI MIURA. "クイア理論はポストモダニズムか？ -Donald Barthelmeの小説技法について -". 名古屋大学大学院国際言語文化研究科, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2237/8050.
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Heitkemper-Yates, Michael David. "Mytho-historical mode : metafictional parody and postmodern high irony in the works of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, and Ishmael Reed." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/8863.
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Beginning with an analysis of Northrop Frye’s concept of modal progression (i.e., the cycle from myth to irony—and back again) and an application of modal theory to an analysis of postmodern narrative forms, the need to revise Frye’s concept of modal progression becomes apparent. Rather than following the cyclical pattern Frye proposes, the course of modal progression appears to be fixed to an axis of experience: a certain normative threshold which describes the narrator’s and/or the narrative protagonist’s power of action relative to an assumed neutral audience. How the narrative depiction of the narrator and/or the fictional protagonist relates to this threshold determines the characteristics of the literary mode. As argued in this dissertation, the increase in the hero’s power of action (typical of late modern and postmodern literature) does not necessarily indicate an abrupt return to the mythic mode (as predicted by Frye). Instead, what is seen to emerge is a decidedly advanced species of narrative irony, or, “high irony” that, while maintaining its distinctly ironic qualities, displays a remarkable tendency to disassemble/reassemble precedent narrative forms (e.g., myth, nonfiction, realistic fiction) into a self-reflexive, highly metafictional form of parody. As the absurd, parodic chaos of the high ironic mode shares several significant traits with both myth and nonfiction, these overlapping, parodic relationships are of great literary importance and theoretical interest. These modal connections and disconnections are what this dissertation attempts to explore and clarify. To that end, this dissertation charts the various ways that myth and nonfictional forms have been put to parodic use in the high ironic metafictions of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover and Ishmael Reed, three writers whose seminal mid-20th century works did much to shape and direct the course of contemporary American literature. Of special emphasis in this study is the American postmodern preoccupation with revision and the politics of literary subversion that attends this revisionary impulse. The final hypothesis reached by this dissertation is that the literary repercussions of these mid-20th century excursions into ironic, metafictional abstraction have not led to a return to myth, but rather to a discernable tendency among 21st century American writers to return to previously eschewed forms of nonironic narrative. This trajectory thus marks a movement away from forms of narrative irony (as well as away from the mode of myth) and an emerging tendency towards more referential, less fantastic forms of narrative fiction.
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Braman, Edward Bernard. "Contested mythologies : Nixon's America and the inscription of political crisis in the fiction of Irvin Faust, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Stanley Elkin and Donald Barthelme." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2018. http://bbktheses.da.ulcc.ac.uk/344/.
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This thesis proposes a new approach to gauging the political content of American postmodernist literature. Locating its analysis inside the historical intensities of the mid-60s through to the early 70s – the Nixon Years – it argues that the period’s experimental writing inscribes a climate of political crisis by invoking the mythologies that drive U.S. ideological thinking, and then unravelling the contestations inside those mythologies. The argument revolves around four case studies, each of which is tested for the degree to which its formal postmodernist strategies underpin a periodic expression of equivocation inside America’s foundational myths. In the first extended analysis of the novelist Irvin Faust, the author’s metafictions are shown to destabilise the inherited myth of City Upon a Hill exceptionalism, particularly around Vietnam. In the under-examined work of Rudolph Wurlitzer, the myth of the western frontier – re-invoked by Kennedy’s New Frontier in 1960 – is ontologically reimagined as a site of regressive violence as opposed to civilised progress. The Nixon Years novels of Stanley Elkin, meanwhile, are positioned as postmodernist parables whose rhetorical extravagance is targeted at the American myth of success, and the financial crisis of 1973. The discrete strategies of these three writers are then examined in aggregate in the work of a canonical postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and lead to the suggestion that his major novels of the Nixon Years, Snow White and The Dead Father, are overarching expressions of a trajectory from a frustrated optimism in the Kennedy 60s to a crisis of political inertia and recursion in the Watergate mid-70s. The thesis concludes that American postmodernist literature can be read as a politically critical engagement with the grand narratives of America’s foundation, and its persistent political rhetoric, where the destabilisations of assumed narrative forms inscribe the disorientations inside America’s traditions of public belief.
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Caughlin, Mark. "Irony is liking things, Donald Barthelme's postmodern poetics." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/mq23243.pdf.
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du, Plessis Michael Deon. "Strings of language: Donald Barthelme and the discourses of postmodernism." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10539/16613.
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Britten, Alex M. "Beckett, Barthelme, and Vonnegut : finding hope in meaninglessness." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1957/29094.
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This thesis is a study of the shifting philosophical trends in the works of Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut as representations of a greater shift from modernism to postmodernism. I have chosen to explore Beckett's plays Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape, Barthelme's short stories "Nothing: A Preliminary Account," "The New Music," and "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegal," and Vonnegut's book Timequake to see how each author seeks to find a new hope in the face of a collapsed causal system. This work is an examination of the form and content of each author's work as it pertains to their own philosophical standing and in relation to the other two authors' works. I argue that each author finds a different hope for humanity depending on their place among the philosophical trends during their time.<br>Graduation date: 2012
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Chang, Hsin Jung, and 張欣蓉. "Donald Barthelme's Black Humor in his Sixty Stories." Thesis, 2007. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/34519255321530458733.
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碩士<br>輔仁大學<br>英國語文學系<br>95<br>This thesis discusses twenty-three kinds of Barthelmeian black humor along with techniques and functions of black humor from Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Throughout these chapters, I focus on how Barthelme relates his criteria and attitudes toward the dark sides of society and life. Humor is his technique to express his concerns.
Chapter One deals with the distorted human relationships in which estrangement, hypocrisy and lies are uppermost. Nine main kinds of black humor are discussed through different relationships in the stories, “For I’m the Boy,” “Will You Tell Me?” and “Views of My Father Weeping.” Chapter Two discusses the special point of view of the first-person narrator in dealing with bizarre societal phenomena and attitudes. “The Balloon,” “The President” and “The Rise of Capitalism” are stories discussed in this chapter. Thirteen kinds of black humor are presented effectively in using the first person narrator as a role in the story and then offering a special perspective on society and life. Chapter Three, with different approach, deals with techniques and functions of black humor. By parodying classical tales, Barthelme smashes our conceptions of fairy tales and their figures. “The Emerald,” “The Glass Mountain” and “Heroes” are stories discussed in this chapter. This chapter will show how Barthelme’s black humor is exemplified in putting tale figures in a contemporary milieu and mocking both the characters’ and the readers’ reactions.
In conclusion, Barthelme’s black humor in Sixty Stories exposes the problems and absurdity in society and life. In a humorous way, Barthelme ridicules the incompatibility between the milieu and the consciousness of human beings. He exaggerates the miserable and then distorts it and jests about it. Emotionally, he helps both characters in the story and readers get through their problems.
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SONG, SU-FENG, and 宋素鳳. "Donald barthelme's city life as a "literary object":a postmodernist reading." Thesis, 1989. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/92373247245816463931.
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Wu, Jia-Hua, and 吳佳樺. "Donald Barthelme’s Linguistic Wonderland: Postmodernist Verbal Play and the Meaning of Understanding." Thesis, 2017. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/5ady9x.
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碩士<br>國立中興大學<br>外國語文學系所<br>105<br>Donald Barthelme as an American Postmodernist writer wrote a great many concise short fictions in a surreal and fragmentary narrative. His writing style makes the uncertainty and openness of textual interpretation, and he created a new form of fiction which breaks with traditional narrative by its incompleteness and openness to play. This thesis aims to discuss the postmodernist play of understanding in Barthelme’s postmodern writings specifically in his two short fictions (collected in Sixty Stories) “Game,” “Nothing: A Preliminary Account,” and his creative essay “Not-Knowing.”
My thesis is divided into three parts. The first chapter tries to discuss the interrelationship between signs and the receiver of signs in Barthelme’s “Game” through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea of play in Truth and Method. In Chapter Two, the limitless continuity in the interpretation of signs in “Nothing: A Preliminary Account” will be discussed by my readings of Martin Heidegger’s arguments concerned with the way to look for the essence of truth in “The Question Concerning Technology” and Jacques Derrida’s idea of play in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Chapter Three tries to discuss the writer’s writing as the application of verbal play has great effect upon readers, and it makes readers notice something “not-knowing” and bring a new way of understanding while reading.
Reading Barthelme’s writing by the application of Gadamer’s theory surely reveals the position that readers participate in the story’s “horizons” by reading and developing readers’ own explanation of text. However, reading Barthelme’s works are also read from Derrida’s deconstructive perspective, it shows Barthelme’s manipulation of words and structure to create different form of narrative and word-meaning relationship. The play of signs is the way how the writer presents the game to the readers through writing. However, what the writer writes are things s/he encounters in the world, the knowledge obtained from life experiences through various “play.” When readers read the text, they join the play in the writer’s work. After all, through the application of words, do people play in signs, or they are actually “played”? Through Gadamer’s and Wittgenstein’s ideas emphasis on the relationship between the meaning of words and the social context, the openness of textual interpretation demonstrated by the writer-reader relationship between the understanding and the application of language in Barthelme’s narrative is discussed. Literature and art as the mediation between one and one’s life, presents the author’s understanding of things already known or unknown, and it also have great effect on other people’s understanding of things known/unknown.