Donald Barthelme Research Articles

The Things We Don't Do

involved, what ought humanity, en masse and individually, do? This question compels arguments with ever greater urgency about economics, morality, core values, dicey ethical questions , philosophy, psychology, sociology (how might a culture respond to such a threat?), politics and ideology, military theory, and more. With its emphasis on ideas, The Dark Forest avoids the common failing of the second novel of a trilogy: inconsequentiality . And it comes to a satisfying (and surprising) end. Indeed, the end is so conclusive it would seems Liu’s entire story is over. But it’s not. Tor will publish the final novel, called Death’s End, in 2016. Michael Morrison University of Oklahoma Andrés Neuman. The Things We Don’t Do. Trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia. Rochester, NY. Open Letter. 2015. 190 pages. Some books demand a slow reading, requiring a period of acclimation. We pick them up in intervals, glimpse their interiors with trepidation. Such is the case with Andrés Neuman’s newly translated The Things We Don’t Do. The Argentine author is not so much writing fiction as he is testing out philosophical theorems by creating stories. There are thirty-four of these experiments, most of them shorter than five pages, all more complicated than they first appear though not necessarily difficult to read. The best of them leave the reader lighter and amused. Imagine if Lydia Davis, Jorge Luis Borges , and Donald Barthelme spawned a literary child; we might get musings such as these. Take, for example, the story “The Poem-Translating Machine,” in which a poet is dissatisfied by a translation of one of his poems and sends it to another poet to translate to see how the two compare. Then he sends it to another poet, and another, obsessively, like a game of telephone , grumbling as each version comes back slightly different from the last. Neuman seems to enjoy turning almost any situation into a psychological cat-and-mouse game, as he does in the story “Juan, José,” a story that alternates between the points of view of the eponymous men, each professing to be a therapist, insisting the other is his client. This back-and-forth leaves one guessing at who the “real” therapist may be. And this is typical in this collection: for whom are we rooting, who is in the “right,” and who or what is real? The stories are grouped into six categories , most are in first person, and most are working out the sort of riddles already mentioned. But we also see stories about family legacies, identity, relationships, and loneliness. The tone ranges from silly to serious. Often the dialogue mirrors reactions that I, as a reader, had. For example, in the parable “A Line in the Sand,” a frustrated woman doesn’t do what we might expect after feeling wronged by her husband ; instead, she (literally) draws a line in the sand on the beach and dares him to cross it. He stands amazed, confused, and exclaims, “This is absurd,” to which she replies, “That’s the point.” The reader is inclined to say as much about many of the stories in this collection: they are odd, funny, bizarre, and, ultimately, absurd. The last section, called “Dodecalogues from a Storyteller,” outlines four sets of twelve axioms for writing that give the reader a clue as to the intent of the author and a set of tools by which to understand better what the latter have just begun to digest (see WLT, May 2014). Perhaps as a warning as much as an invitation, one of these axioms states: “A completely rounded story encircles the readers, does not let them out. In fact, it does not let them in either.” So true of these fresh and quirky stories. Jason Christian Oklahoma City Mukoma Wa Ngugi. Mrs. Shaw. Athens, Ohio. Ohio University Press. 2015. 235 pages. Mrs. Shaw takes place in two vastly different settings: the Kwatee Republic, a fictitious , pan-African name for Kenya, and World Literature in Review 82 WLT MARCH / APRIL 2016 ...

Between Sinister and Funny

Between Sinister and Funny Judith Podell (bio) Violent Outbursts Thasseus Rutkowski Spuyten Duyvil www.spuytenduyvil.net 107 Pages; Print, $16.00 There’s such a fine line between sinister and funny or between outright psychosis and the stuff of TV sitcoms; Thaddeus Rutkowski reminds us in 86 terse, deadpan, and frequently surreal vignettes, many of which have been previously published in magazines and anthologies such as Barbaric Yawp, Poetry in Performance, and Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. The cover of Violent Outbursts could be an illustration from at least one of them. I’m thinking of “In College,” the longest, which summarizes the college experience in a four-page list of likes (heavy metal music, off-campus housing, live models in art class) and dislikes (art theory, sexual frustration, social humiliation). Under a Magritte blue sky and a backdrop of three tilting houses with TVs in every window, a young shirtless man, illuminated by a street lamp, faces a figure, presumably female, who is standing in the doorway. They stand too far apart to suggest intimacy but from his determined stance, and the fact that there’s a boom box at his feet, we think he’s prepared to stand ground: I liked showing up unannounced at the home of a person, especially if the person was a young woman I had a crush on. I didn’t like waiting for hours outside a door like a stalker, until the person who lived behind the door arrived. I didn’t like hearing after waiting for the person I was waiting for that I was not her “idea of a romantic hero.” From the shape of young man’s head, which is squared and suggestive of a flat top haircut, we might even assume he’s the older version of the nameless boy from “Pigeon Landing:” When I was 6, a pigeon landed squarely on my head. The pigeon landed squarely because my head was square, or more like a cube. There was a flat area on top just big enough for a medium sized bird to land on, without falling off. Or maybe that was just how the pigeon saw my head. The givens of childhood: a father of Polish descent who’s somewhat nuts, an immigrant Chinese mother, and an outhouse in his backyard: None of the kids who lived in town had outhouses. I didn’t really feel underprivileged. I just felt like I was living in an earlier era, when people had no indoor plumbing. My friend knew how to get girls. All he had to do was bring them into his basement and breakout the sticks. I myself had no clue about romance, but I was sure the one thing I didn’t want to be carrying on a date was my flute. Those familiar with Rutkowski’s work might recognize these details from Tetched (2005) (which Rutkowski calls “a novel in fractals”); only here they have been stripped down, assembled in the kind of associative order one might find in a collage or an album and set free from the limits of gravity. Rutkowski has cited Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan as influences, but for me, his singular voice and vision the matter of fact surrealism of a Charles Simic poem or a Saul Steinberg drawing. If you flap your arms hard enough, you can fly but not far. Reality is provisional and has the random assembly quality of a dream: ramshackle, poorly made, or a few pieces missing. We’re in a house on the outskirts of a small town in the middle of no place in particular but it feels like home. In the back yard, “tattooed, rubberized family life goes on while up in the sky, the saucer approaches.” Or maybe we’re in a speeding car until unspecified “things settle down,” en route to Pit Bull Stadium where everyone sings the Pit Bull anthem. Rutkowski will take a figure of speech literally, throw in a unicorn, and then detonate: I wanted to be a soul brother, but I didn’t have the rhythm or the siblings to succeed. I was living in a void, a place without music or...

Donald Barthelme's Visual Approach in the Short Story “At the Tolstoy Museum”

Donald Barthelme's short story “At the Tolstoy Museum” belongs to his "Picture Texts" and "Art Gallery" that pastes common objects obtained from the world in unexpected proximity on the picture plane and overturns their predictability as artistic symbols. The paper reaches the conclusion that Donald Barthelme's visual approach in the short story "At the Tolstoy Museum" is similar to René Magritte's process of "resemblance". A composition's "resemblance" to the world deceives the viewer into thinking that he can successfully categorize among and interpret his perceptual experience, while the vague relationships among the graphic and verbal fragments, varied and repeated, counter his ordering activity with disorientation. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p200

On Word-Play in The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme

The Dead Father (1975) by Donald Barthelme recounts a quite simple story but it won Barthelme a well-deserved reputation; the most significant element for the achievements concerning this novel lies in the writing itself, which represents a splendid application of postmodern writing techniques, especially word-play. In this novel, Barthelme manages to transform the traditional rational language in a playing manner. This employment contributes The Dead Father as a typical postmodern work, which reflects the postmodern society in Barthelme’s eyes and displays prominently Barthelme’s intention and talents to evolve the literary writing techniques. Nothing of the traditional literature is safe from his challenging pen in the context of this novel: words, phrases, sentences or fables are equally dismentaled and deconstructed.

The Nagging Father: Donald Barthelme's Narrative Framing of Gender and Family Violence

While Barthelme's ironic treatment of patriarchy is acknowledged in some critical accounts, the specifics of Barthelme's gender politics remain an object of critical dispute. Through an exploration of an aspect of Barthelme's fiction that has been afforded insufficient critical attention so far—Barthelme's narrative framing of his male characters' threats or actual infliction of physical violence against partners and children—this essay shows that Barthelme's fiction projects an image of patriarchy as a sadistic gentlemen's club rather than as a flawed but redeemable system, and that Barthelme's gender politics is strongly anti-masculinist and anti-Oedipal.

The Hybrids of Postmodernism

Hybridization is a fundamental characteristic of postmodernism, included by Ihab Hassan in his “catena” of features. This paper looks into the hybrids of postmodernism, which are the result of migration, displacement and uprooting, the re-visitation of myths, folklore and legends, or projections of their author’s imagination. The hybrids used as examples here are drawn from several novels written by Salman Rushdie, especially The Satanic Verses, two short stories, one by Marquez and the other by Donald Barthelme, Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, Cartarescu’s Encyclopaedia of Dragons and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven. Diverse as they may be, these hybrids emphasize a defining characteristic of postmodernism, which is its pluralism. I conclude that the hybrids of postmodernism are aesthetically or politically subversive. Besides, what makes them difficult to grasp is their unfixed and protean nature. They ask for high leaps of the imagination, a total suspension of disbelief and a complete surrender to the powerful seduction of imagination on the reader’s part.

The Absence of the Book and the Future of the Work: Blanchot, Barthelme, and Creative Reading Practice

This paper conducts a close and creative – meaning of creation, concerned with creating – reading of Donald Barthelme's ‘Nothing: A Preliminary Account’ in an attempt to make manifest Blanchot's theory of reading and his notion of the absence of the book. Using Blanchot and Barthelme's critical-creative works, the paper argues that the reader actually creates texts through the act of temporally juxtaposing and orienting works toward and around each other, such that each text is crafted not only by individual reader-psyches but the adjacent texts and reading conditions in which the work is consumed. In this way, texts are bound to temporal readerly circumstance – or, as Blanchot puts it, ‘scriptuary exigency’ – and authors can only conceive of audience speculatively. The paper introduces the Oulipian notion of anticipatory plagiarism and recent theories about deliberate anachronism to illustrate that time in fiction is a fundamental concern of the writer as well as a source of anxiety for the reader. Ultimately, I argue that the texts we author are in fact further composed by those text's future-tense reading situations and demonstrates how considering our text's future during the writing process might recalibrate a work's capacities and potential.

Dwelling as an approach to creative pedagogy

Abstract This research article looks to provide an alternate account of creative pedagogy to the predominant view that maintaining change and the generation of options is the bastion of creative teaching. A tenet of modern art is that it eschews continuity of form in favour of ideological disjuncture. The zenith of this paralogical development being the dematerialization of the art object and the conceptual turn in art making. From 1968 onwards, free from material certainties, and aiming itself beyond the commodity address of historic modernism, contemporary art has proved to be an uncomfortable relative of education. Artistic practice has developed a problematic relationship to knowledge. A contested and unshackled pursuit, it possesses no consistent method and its teaching is cloaked in the overtly mythological outline of tacit-knowledge. The resurgence in popularity of Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not-Knowing is symptomatic of the hiatus that is now at the centre of the expansion of artistic pedagogy. This article sees the known and accepted view of the development of art pedagogy subjugating a parallel account of creative development that has stasis, dwelling and the maintaining of a fixed position at its core. This research suggests that an alternate account of artistic creativity can be developed from a number of artists who emerged during early and late 1960s whose artistic contribution was to establish a fixed and defined position that has remained unchanged for over 40 years. This article will look at the artistic work of two British Artists who have long-standing relationships to British and European Art education (Alan Charlton, Roger Ackling) to present a counterpoint to ‘not knowing’.

Donald Barthelme’s “Report” and Michal Rovner’s Decoy series, or the Ongoing Art of Telling It Slant

Cet article examine la maniere dont deux œuvres contemporaines, les nouvelles « Brain Damage » et « Report » de Donald Barthelme et la serie Decoys de l’artiste israelienne Michal Rovner utilisent la surexposition a des fins de denonciation des contenus televisuels. Chez Barthelme, cela passe par une rhetorique de l’exces et de la satire ; chez Rovner, par la mobilisation d’images surexposees et floues, dans la volonte de « defaire » et deconstruire les representations mediatiques de la guerre.

Barthelme’s Vision of the Postmodern Society in His Short-Fiction

The paper examines short stories of the distinguished American postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme that make an assessment of the concept of the society by creating a world that reveals his vision of the society. Many of Barthelme’s short-stories describe the social fabric that holds them together including the buying and selling of luxurious items, services, and even other human beings within an affluent, amoral social set, whose insatiable desire for travel, novelty, and escape also functions as a form of play. An appraisal of the world defined by the short stories “To London and Rome” “City Life”, and “Perpetua” reveals Barthelme’s vision of the contemporary postmodern society. Development of this theme in these individual stories in which it appears constitutes one of the Barthelme’s achievements in literature. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p620

On Keeping Company with Wolves: Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves”

On Keeping Company with Wolves:Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” Jim Shepard (bio) I encountered that group of writers that came to be known as the fabulists at just about the perfect time for me, although I didn’t know it then. I was at the end of my undergraduate education, and I’d already known from an early age that I wanted to write fiction. But given that I had gone to such a craphole of a high school, and had started to figure out just how much I really didn’t know, I decided that my only hope was to hunker down and go small when it came to ambition: to write obsessively about only what I knew, or thought I knew. The results were what you might expect: stories about sensitive and troubled but covertly appealing lower-middle-class kids negotiating your run-of-the-mill family dysfunctions. I don’t remember how I first encountered Angela Carter’s fiction—I don’t think it was in class, though a class reference probably led to it—but boy, did she blow the doors off that particular project. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it then, but no writer in the twentieth century did a better job of reminding us both of the importance of staying in touch with one’s own sense of play, and of granting those imagined states their own grave authority. Most, if not all, of the fabulists exposed how much [End Page 69] there was to be gained from pillaging high and low culture, and all of them had their particular pleasures, but while Donald Barthelme was mordant and deadpan, and Robert Coover all antic demolition, Angela Carter was the one who most reliably kept the reader in touch with the exhilaration and exuberance of encountering imagined worlds we thought we already knew. She reconceived all sorts of canonical fairy tales and fables with not only a sly and witty subversiveness but also a startling fierceness. Her work signaled a recommitment to the power of those primal feelings that fairy tales and fables were designed to mobilize: terror, or desire, feelings that attended upon revelations about the fundamental and unapologetic intimacy of innocence and guilt, say, or of eros and thanatos. So that we get, in “The Company of Wolves,” the expected wryness of both psychoanalytic and feminist lenses being trained on the narrative of Little Red Riding Hood—in all sorts of ways, our story proceeds with a noticeably Freudian logic, and our heroine makes abundantly clear that she’s no one’s doormat—and at times the result can be deftly funny. When the virginal but blooming and strong-minded child makes her way through the woods to her grandmother’s house, she finds herself powerfully attracted to a handsome hunter, with his flash of white teeth and carcasses of game birds, and we’re informed, “This young man had a remarkable object in his pocket. It was a compass.” And in terms of the ways in which that Freudianism and feminism come together, we also get a disconcerting sense of what else she’s attracted to: “He laughed at her again; gleaming trails of spittle clung to his teeth.” Granny, it turns out, with her Bible for company and her china spaniels on either side of the fireplace, has been trying to “keep the wolves outside by living well,” but that’s not going to fly, and she’s promptly devoured. But before she becomes just a pile of bones and some inedible hair, even she is erotically mesmerized by what happens when “the forest has come into the kitchen with darkness tangled in its hair.” When the wolf—or werewolf, in this case—strips off his shirt, “his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit,” and it’s hard, in twentieth-century literature, to come up with a moment as comic and disturbing as her reaction when he strips off his trousers: “His genitals, huge. Ah! huge.” Naturally, then, Little Red Riding Hood herself is even more compelled. She spies a tuft of her grandmother’s hair, registers how fully she’s in danger...

On Social Reality behind the Absurdity of Barthelme’s The Glass Mountain

Donald Barthelme’s The Glass Mountain is listed as one of the most representative postmodern fictions, but behind the absurdity lies social reality. This essay analyzes it in three different perspectives, i.e. structural, linguistic and narrative perspectives, finding that the fiction closely reflects the social facts, including the disorder of the capitalist system, people’s spiritual conflicts and struggle for peace and order, and the abnormality and indifference between acquaintances, which simultaneously embodies the author's inner poignancy to the existing social reality of the age on the one hand, as well as his sincere wishes for the harmonious and natural social relationship on the other.

Surrealist histories of language, image, media: Donald Barthelme’s ‘collage stories’

Abstract Using previously neglected archival materials from the Donald Barthelme Literary Papers at the University of Houston Libraries, my article identifies the sources of Donald Barthelme’s collages and their allusive meanings. In doing so, the author’s under-appreciated relationship with artistic collage techniques is further elucidated, revealing how indebted his work is to the innovations of surrealist collage production. Principal amongst these influences is Max Ernst’s ‘historical’ collage aesthetic. Using the theories of Marshall McLuhan, I argue that Barthelme’s technique of pictorial collage is an attempt to rival contemporary systems of representation (like television and radio), while recognizing the significance of mass media on his work. Capturing the evolving landscape of contemporary mass culture, I examine the relationship between text and image in Barthelme’s short stories.

Donald Barthelme and the Emergence of the Dynamic Page

The dynamic page has emerged as the basis for contemporary reading in an electronic environment. Donald Barthelme's fiction explores many of the narrative issues raised by the dynamic page even before the widespread adoption of electronic textuality and graphical user interfaces, and can help to resolve debates about the agency of writer and reader in electronic textual environments.

The High Line, “The Balloon,” and Heterotopia

The High Line, a new park on an old elevated railway on Manhattan, is an otherworldly space that invites an understanding in terms of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia. However, this often-used term requires critical reflection, particularly to extend it beyond the immediately spatial to include the realm of the discursive. To this end, an analysis of the High Line is paired with a reading of a similarly different space in Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon.” Bringing together a real park and a literary space shows how Foucault’s concept requires combining the focus on the spatial in “Of Other Spaces” with the focus on structural order in The Order of Things, if it is to be used for understanding not just theoretical or fictional but also actual spaces.

Barthelme's "Paraguay," the Postmodern, and Neocolonialism

In his article 'Paraguay,' the Postmodern, and Neocolonialism, Daniel Chaskes explores the analytic opportunities afforded by conjoining globalizing critical approaches with a story by an author who has often been circumscribed by the postmodern rubric. Donald Barthelme's Paraguay, written the summer after Nelson Rockefeller's fact-finding mission to South America in 1969, provides a chance to consider modes of anti-colonial critique in Barthelme's work. It also offers examples of a more self-reflective criticism aimed at the U.S. counterculture and, less consciously, the indeterminacies of postmodernism. Chaskes reads Paraguay with the aim of understanding Barthelme's hemispheric interest and he investigates the multiple cultural touchstones Barthelme draws on in a text that suggests troubling parallels between the New Left, the avant-garde, and the neocolonial political project. Paraguay offers a uniquely postmodern take on social commentary in which the text's form enacts the very tendencies being scrutinized: habits of seeing non-U.S. peoples as subjectless and placeless. Daniel Chaskes, 'Paraguay,' the Postmodern, and Neocolonialism page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.4 (2012):

The Twittering Machine

In Donald Barthelme's School, you end up in a classroom where everything dies. The orange trees, the snakes, the tropical fish, the salamanders, the puppy, the Korean orphan, the grandparents, the parents, even some of the students. In just two pages, the story has the momentum of a howitzer, piling the bodies up in inverted pyramid of importance. The teacher tells the story and he does it with the boozy intimacy of last call. The children in the story get disillusioned by the incongruity of their position: all this death and they were stuck in school. The children ask the teacher to make love to his assistant, so they can have, in their words, an assertion of value. The teacher protests, then acquiesces, he and the assistant kiss, there's a knock at the door, a gerbil walks in, the children go wild with happiness. I taught this story to a class of rising sixth-graders last summer. As a teacher, I have a bad habit of only wanting to talk about what I am currently excited about, a strategy guaranteed to teach my students nothing but how to have a conversation with a vaguely unhinged personality manically obsessed with a topic. It's problematic, but I have no alternative other than actually preparing a lesson plan, and that isn't going to happen any time soon. If you want to examine emotional scarring, talk with a class of sixth graders about death and suffering. They're geniuses on the subject. Each of my students had a story, of a relative, pet, or classmate, who died suddenly. They all knew they had been lied to about the deaths. Pria wanted to know how, on the drive home from the vet's after the family dog was put down, her mother was able to laugh and cry at the same time. Everyone was confused and scared, and it was beautiful. We all looked suffering and death in the face and none of us had any answers. I told them that it was hard and it got harder and then it gets easier, but I lacked the language to tell them why. Then, instead of a gerbil walking into the classroom, we went to recess.

Provacative Pages

Provacative Pages Roxane Gay (bio) Bookslut, Jessa Crispin, Founder. http://www.bookslut.com In an age where critics often lament an impoverished culture of criticism, there are certain review outlets that serve as a reminder that a vibrant culture of criticism is alive and well, if you just know where to look. Bookslut, a popular literary criticism website, was founded by Jessa Crispin in 2002. In a 2008 interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Crispin said she founded the site because, “We’re making book reviews more accessible without dumbing it down. That’s what was missing in the national discussion of books.” For the past decade, Bookslut has done exactly that—publishing reviews, interviews, columns, and feature essays on a monthly basis. Crispin also maintains a blog with daily posts about literary news, provocative quotations from writers, and, occasionally, social commentary. Interviews with writers are one of the site’s strongest features. Because Bookslut publishes only online, there are no word count limitations, and interviews are often languorous, thoughtful, and deeply engaging. There are few questions about process or recommended reading you find in typical author interviews. Instead, interviewers ask probing, lengthy questions that encourage writers to really discuss their work, motivations, aesthetic, and more. In a December 2009 interview between Elizabeth Hildreth and Kathleen Rooney, discussing Rooney’s book Live Nude Girl: My Life As An Object, topics covered include the female body and its display, nude modeling, memoir, beauty, self-esteem, sex, and photography. Lena Dunham, the creator of HBO’s Girls, interviewed Douglas A. Martin in February 2008 about his latest collection, In the Time of Assignments. Dunham was, at the time, a student and budding filmmaker at Oberlin College. Her questions were pointed and intelligent, including an interesting question about the concept of the confessional in contemporary poetry. Bookslut also features long form essays. One of the strongest pieces on the site is Elizabeth Ellen’s June 2010 essay, “Stalking Dave Eggers,” a stark but poignant meditation on how, as her marriage unraveled, Ellen thought she was having an online affair with Dave Eggers via an Internet forum where many writers communicated. She talks about how participating in this forum was where she learned a great deal about writing. Ellen writes, And though I didn’t realize it at the time, we shared educations. Or, more to the point, I stole theirs. Unlike the majority of writers I know, I never got an MFA. I never even completed my undergrad. I dropped out of college my sophomore year due to an onslaught of panic attacks and agoraphobia and never went back. When I came to the thread, I’d never heard of the vast majority of contemporary writers. I started reading George Saunders and Lorrie Moore and A. M. Homes and Donald Barthelme and Aimee Bender and Lydia Davis and Denis Johnson because these were the writers my friends on the thread were reading. By the end of her story, Ellen realizes that the man she had been corresponding with wasn’t Dave Eggers and is unflinching in recounting the humiliation of running into Eggers at a party, assuming they had been communicating, and the aftermath of that encounter, and how she moved on from it. “Stalking Dave Eggers,” like many of the essays in Bookslut, is the kind of work not traditionally found in critical publications, but it also feels like a necessary part of the literary conversation, looking not only at writing but how writers interact in the modern age and how sometimes, the lines between rising and famous writers are incredibly blurred. Other equally compelling work includes Michael Schaub’s December 2002 essay about the Texas Book Festival, Liz Miller’s August 2003 essay about attending ComicCon told as an accounting of her time each day, a November 2006 essay by Heather Smith about gender and book covers, and an examination of the lifespan of literary magazines in February 2011 by Daniel Nester and Steve Black. Reviews each month cover poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as works in translation. Both mainstream and small press writing are reviewed, and Bookslut makes a point of reviewing work that might not receive critical consideration in...

Points of Contention: Rethinking the Past, Present, and Future of Punctuation

“The semicolon has become so hateful to me,” confessed Paul Robinson in a 2002 essay, “that I feel almost morally compromised when I use it.” When Robinson, a humanities professor at Stanford University, sees a dot balanced over a comma, he is filled with hate and “exasperation.”1 Robinson is perhaps the semicolon’s most devoted foe, but he is hardly its only modern detractor. A host of novelists, from George Orwell to Donald Barthelme, have discoursed on its ugliness, or irrelevance, or both.2 Kurt Vonnegut was unequivocal in his last book, advising writers, “Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”3 Nor is Robinson the only member of the academy to spurn the semicolon; it was an academic who congratulated Umberto Eco for using no semicolons whatsoever in The Name of the Rose.4 Yet it was the scholarly community—the humanists in particular—that brought the mark to life in the fifteenth century. They conceived of the semicolon as an aid to clarity, not, as Robinson now

Landscapes of Postmodernity: Donald Barthelme's Architecture

ABSTRACT Exploring Donald Barthelme's literary representations of architecture, this essay traces how the author manipulates architectural history as a means of critiquing modernism and contemporary culture. Despite frequent references to Barthelme's familial relationship to architecture, little has been studied about how this intimacy is encoded in his imaginative writings. Focusing on the short story collections Sixty Stories and Forty Stories, this essay considers the usefulness of architecture as an interart analogy for Barthelme's texts. Seizing on the theories of Fredric Jameson, I argue that Barthelme's works highlight popular displeasure with modernist orthodoxy by using strategies similar to early postmodern architecture.