Donald Barthelme Research Articles

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930- 1980 (review)

Reviewed by: Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980 David W. Madden Steven Weisenburger. Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, 1930–1980. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995. 320 pp. In Fables of Subversion Steven Weisenburger challenges a host of traditional notions about satire and postmodern American fiction. In spite of its seemingly limited scope—American novels between 1930 and 1980—Weisenburger offers a serious and probing refutation of New Critical assumptions that have dominated scholarly and popular discourse on the subject. [End Page 848] The study’s introduction carefully lays the conceptual and theoretical foundation for the five remaining chapters. Weisenburger draws a crucial distinction between generative and “degenerative” satirical writing, with the generative mode representing traditional satires. The degenerative mode he describes as “delegitimizing . . . function[ing] to subvert hierarchies of value and to reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. Still more, it suspects that any symbolic practice may entail incursions of power whose logic tends toward either total domination or the final chaos of reciprocal violence.” This degenerative mode is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Drawing primarily on Jean-François Lyotard, Weisenburger emphasizes the postmodern doubt about the modernists’ attempts to use literature as a way of establishing a canon of high art and enlightenment. Instead, postmodern art emphasizes contingency and pluralist approaches, which, “[d]espite all their apparent negativity and nihilism, . . . the subversive carnivals of postmodernism bear witness to the opening of a ‘pagan’ discourse that was always at the heart of modern darkness.” Postmodern satirists “suspect all structures, including structures of perceiving, representing, and transforming,” and their works interrogate the violence and terror inherent in established cultural forms of discourse. Consistent features of the contemporary satire are its deformations of plot, grotesque violence, transtextuality, and excessive attention to details. Weisenburger clearly demonstrates the ways in which Formalist criticism has dominated the scholarship on satire, defining conventions which simply have nothing to do with degenerative, postmodern fictions. Weisenburger refutes the validity of four crucial assumptions underlying traditional criticism—satire is a rhetorical formulation offering a rational argument and appealing to the common opinions of a majority of readers; it requires an extramural object of attack rather than the act of fiction-making itself; satire is a moral or ethical corrective; and it is normative. In each case he demonstrates that the methods and purposes of degenerative satire have nothing in common with conventions drawn from far more conventional satiric models. Finally, the introduction considers research on the grotesque and carnivalesque to clarify the sensibility of degenerative satire. “Carnival definitively illustrates the semiotic processes of dismantling and exposure of [End Page 849] which satire is a part. Amid its disorder, one discovers points of view, specific orderings that are suppressed by or in sharp opposition to authorized representations.” The lineage of writers considered begins with Nathanael West whose works tend increasingly toward the fully accomplished degenerative mode defined in the first chapter. The Day of the Locust is the apogee of West’s satiric practices and a work that “can be read as a narrative about the troubled emergence of a radical, degenerative mode of satire.” Analyses of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood and John Hawkes’s The Cannibal emphasize the contemporary development of this sensibility. A chapter devoted to Black Humor presents the most careful and well-argued reevaluation of that literary phenomenon to date. While regarding Black Humor as “the early, literary expression of an emerging postmodernism,” Weisenburger cuts through the hyperbole of many longstanding assumptions to demonstrate that the impulse to joke dominates the fictions of Kurt Vonnegut, J. P. Donleavy, and Terry Southern. James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, a book for some time overlooked by critics and scholars, is seen as an inspired failure, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Hawkes’s Travesty are submitted as the most daring and fully realized examples of Black Humor satire. A fourth chapter addresses examples of social and political satire in the 1960s, wherein Weisenburger argues that postmodern American satires have less to do with corrective solutions than the exposition of dissent...

Reading Tensions: Of Sterne, Klee, and the Secret Police

Reading Tensions: Of Sterne, Klee, and the Secret Police Bertrand Gervais (bio) In literature, reading is often the object of a limited, because highly specialized, conception. There are a great number of texts, an infinity of readers of diverse competences, complex encyclopedias, but only one act of reading, only one task described. Reading is merely one exercise, at times better executed than others. Yet the forms taken by this act are multiple, ranging from close reading and criticism, to ludic and speed reading. Our life is indeed full of these various acts of reading, from the newspaper we hastily glance at to the literary text we endlessly comment upon. With the exception of Constance school reception theory and aesthetics (Iser, Jauss, Stierle), based on a hermeneutic tradition, some semiotics of reading (Eco, Riffaterre), and more recent reader-response criticism, literary studies use and put forth conceptions of reading that do not recognize or account for its diversity. Since it tries to establish the ground for one of its most accomplished practices, literary reading, it does not concern itself with its basic processes. As a result, the act of reading is seen less as a process than a result—a static view. 1 In the following pages, I will present a view of reading that takes into consideration, in a literary setting, some of its means and processes. Reading, I will propose, consists of both progressing and comprehending, and its diversity depends on the importance given to one or the other. The complementarity of these processes are in fact fundamental to the act of reading. The aim of this study then is to describe reading as an activity whose form is closely related to the tension between two principles, progression and comprehension. I will begin by describing the ongoing opposition established between progression and comprehension in traditional discussions of the act of reading and then move on to discuss the essential characteristics of both of these principles. This will allow me to present, in the last segment of this essay, a few elements pertaining to the constitution of literary reading. I will use, as an example, a short story by Donald Barthelme entitled “Paul Klee.” But first though, a few words on the general framework of this essay are needed. [End Page 855] I. Poetics of Reading The objective here is to present a conception of reading in which the reader plays a role as important as the text in establishing how his or her act will be accomplished. This represents a shift, on a conceptual level, in who controls the reading situation and how it will develop. It is a way, also, to avoid certain pitfalls of what can be called a “poetics of reading.” 2 One of the dangers facing any literary theory of reading is a too great importance granted to the text read. The difference between what a reader does and what the text tells him to do must clearly be stated. Yet, the current trend in literary conceptions of reading tends to identify the text’s demands with the reader’s actions. Studies are often limited to the reader and his or her act inscribed in the text, as if this settled all queries. This type of study has been popularized by the arrival of poststructuralism; it is the immediate result of an initial recontextualization of the literary text. Russian formalism and structuralism, which had identified the text as an object of inquiry, had left it completely isolated. The first reflex has been to search for signs of its original situation. Like a torn limb, the text bears scars of its production and reading situations, and their description must allow its reinsertion. These scars take the shape of the implied or implicit reader and audience, the narratee, the Model Reader, and so on. They are the proof that the text is not an independent entity, closed and complete in itself, but they never go beyond the text itself. The object of study is never the reading situation, the relationship developed between the text and the reader while reading, but the trace of what it could be, according to only one of its terms, the text that...

Conquest of the New Word: Experimental Fiction and Translation in the Americas.

Latin American fiction won great acclaim in the United States during the 1960s, when many North American writers and critics felt that our national writing had reached a low ebb. In this study of experimental fiction from both Americas, Johnny Payne argues that the North American reception of the boom in Latin American fiction distorted the historical grounding of this writing, erroneously presenting it as mainly an exotic magical realism. He offers new readings that detail the specific, historical relation between experimental fiction and various authors' careful, deliberate deformations and reformations of the political rhetoric of the modern state. Payne juxtaposes writers from Argentina and Uruguay with North American authors, setting up suggestive parallels between the diverse but convergent practices of writers on both continents. He considers Nelson Marra in conjunction with Donald Barthelme and Gordon Lish; Teresa Porzecanski with Harry Mathews; Ricardo Piglia with John Barth; Silvia Schmid and Manuel Puig with Fanny Howe and Lydia Davis; and Jorge Luis Borges and Luisa Valenzuela with William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. With this innovative, dual-continent approach, Conquest of the New Word will be of great interest to everyone working in Latin American literature, women's studies, translation studies, creative writing, and cultural theory.

Pomorex: Arthurian Tradition in Barthelme's The King , Acker's Don Quixote , and Reed's Flight to Canada

This article assesses the use of Arthurian themes in Donald Barthelme's The King, Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, and Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada. While Barthelme has few problems lamenting the loss of Arthurian innocence in the modern world, Acker presents a feminist critique of the Arthurian/chivalric embeddedness in 'masculinity,' and Reed presents a profound and profoundly comic critique of the 'whiteness' of Arthurian values as reflected in the vicious owner of the plantation Camelot, Arthur Swille.

Clarence Major's Innovative Fiction

In a novel,Clarence Major told interviewer John O'Brien only thing you really have is words. You begin with words, and you end with words. The content exists in our minds. I don't firm it has to be a reflection of anything(130). With this statement Major separated himself from the dominantly realistic tradition of both commercial publishing and the academic canon and identified his work with the disruptively experimental style being explored by writers emerging in the 1960s and flourishing in the 1970s and '80s. Whether crafted by Clarence Major and Ishmael Reed or by Ronald Sukenick and Donald Barthelme, such anti-realistic (and even anti-mimetic) fiction has been distinguished by its polemical opposition to the established principles of literary form. These finished novels and short stories are by no means imitations of an action or reflections of the world; instead, works such as Emergency Exit and My Amputations are additions to the world, real things in themselves to be admired for what they are, not as transparent windows to or representations of some pre-existing reality. That fiction should not be offering a representation marks a change in its historical development, a change Major sees as necessitated by social and technological forces that have made life and our tools for recording it so different from conditions in previous times. Television can give us the news, innovative fictionists argue; novels and short stories can better express our response to the news. And so as the camera's invention prompted painters to experiment with increasingly radical forms of abstraction, our current saturation with television news, print journalism, popular history, and autobiography have challenged fiction writers to find new ways of producing their work. The result has been a transformation of subject matter from a topic of fiction to a record of the writer's activity, a process Roland Barthes has described as restructuring the infinitive to write as an intransitive verb(11). Elements of the real are certainly present in such writing, but under no illusion that they are the work's point. Instead, Clarence Major reminds his readers at every stage how he is using these materials to create a fiction. There is no suspension of disbelief. Quite the contrary: The reader is often asked to help create the work, making his or her reaction an important part of the story. For all of its abstractness, there is a strongly personal cast to Major's fiction. Part of his anti-illusionistic strategy is to deal with these elements honestly, to use the energy and excitement of his reaction to these events as the substance of his narratives. Although raised in Chicago (on the mid-South Side), his occasional visits to his Georgia birthplace and an especially memorable summer spent there supply the emotional background for both early and recent novels. The Chicago shows are present in his first novel All-Night Visitors (1969), as are the New York City environs Major experienced as a young professional His early aptitude for art, which led to a brief fellowship at the Chicago Art Institute following high school, shows itself in the lyrically expressive style of Reflex and Bone Structure (1975) and especially in Emergency Exit (1979), which includes the author's paintings as integral components of the narrative. Widely traveled as a visiting professor and writer-in-residence, Clarence Major has drawn upon his European experiences for the structure and fabric (and not just topicality) of his equally ambitious novel My Amputations (1986); his own self-portrait graces the cover, a painting of the painter at work on the picture we see. Not in the least metafictive, this disposition to use one's own energy of life is part of a larger, sometimes submerged current in American literature that reached from Whitman and Toomer to William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, and Amiri Baraka (notably in Baraka's early fiction written as LeRoi Jones). …

"Not Yet Blindingly One": <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> and the Hypertextualists

Introducing a posthumous collection of writings by Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon says that book in hand offers the do-it-yourself hypertextualist … a chance to browse and recombine, often with striking results (I xv). For those of us whose work in hypertext has been deeply informed by Pynchon's fiction, this statement in itself represents a pretty striking development, not to mention a huge thrill. For starters, it logs Pynchon's name on very short list of artworld legends who have speculated that hypertext might be worth thinking about (see also Coover and Eno). It also bolsters our suspicion that writers like Acker, Burroughs, Coover, Dick, Pynchon, Reed, Rushdie and others have developed a narrative sensibility that resonates with–or, as they say in cultural studies, articulates to (see Grossberg) –certain late-breaking developments in communication technology. This should not be surprising. After all, Pynchon is writer who gave us Tyrone [Jr.] and his fantasy of Electroworld.

Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction

Donald Barthelme: A Study of the Short Fiction

The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme

The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition.

Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition.

Fiction in the quantum universe

In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme. According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer realistic; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known -- all terms taken from new physics. Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy, and open endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled promises and completed patterns. Gravity's Rainbow , for example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Strehle argues that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century history, politics, science, and discourse.

Donald Barthelme: a study of the short fiction

Donald Barthelme: a study of the short fiction

Donald Barthelme: an exhibition

Donald Barthelme (1931–1989) is regarded as one of the most imitated and influential American fiction writers since the early 1960s. In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, Jerome Klinkowitz presents both an appreciation and a comprehensive examination of the life work of this pathbreaking contemporary writer. A blend of close reading, biography, and theory, this retrospective—informed by Klinkowitz’s expert command of postmodern American fiction—contributes significantly to a new understanding of Barthelme’s work. Klinkowitz argues that the central piece in the Barthelme canon, and the key to his artistic method, is his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Dead Father. In turning to this pivotal work, as well as to Barthelme’s short stories and other novels, Klinkowitz explores the way in which Barthelme reinvented the tools of narration, characterization, and thematics at a time when fictive techniques were largely believed to be exhausted. Klinkowitz, who was one of the first scholars to study Barthelme’s work and became its definitive bibliographer, situates Barthelme’s life and work within a broad spectrum of influences and affinities. A consideration of developments in painting and sculpture, for example, as well as those of contemporaneous fiction, contribute to Klinkowitz’s analysis. This astute reading will provide great insight for readers, writers, and critics of contemporary American fiction seeking explanations and justifications of Barthelme’s critical importance in the literature of our times.

Postmodernism for High-School Students

Postmodernism is a fact of everyday life. We live in a world of uncertainty, of lapses in-if not absence of-authority, of fragmentation, of visual and auditory overload, of the blurring of lines between mass culture and elite culture. Such features have found their way into contemporary literature and particularly into the literature labeled postmodern. Its leading writers date from the 1960s and, while predominantly white males, are not the canonical giants of our American literature classes. The postmodern camp is inhabited by such writers as William Burroughs, Robert Coover, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and African American writer Ishmael Reed. Most of the works of these writers are too

Donald Barthelme Fades Away from Here to Eternity

Donald Barthelme Fades Away from Here to Eternity

Donald Barthelme: A Preliminary Account

Research Article| July 01 1991 Donald Barthelme: A Preliminary Account Rosellen Brown Rosellen Brown Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1991) 90 (3): 483–498. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-90-3-483 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Rosellen Brown; Donald Barthelme: A Preliminary Account. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 July 1991; 90 (3): 483–498. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-90-3-483 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1991 by Duke University Press1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Understanding Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme was known chiefly for his short fiction, much of which appeared initially in The New Yorker magazine. He was also the author of several novels (including Snow White, The Dead Father, Paradise, and the posthumous The King), children's books, miscellaneous non-fiction, and film and book reviews. This book examines in detail both the fiction and non-fiction of one of the most acclaimed writers of innovative American fiction. It places Barthelme's work within the context of other post-modern disciplines, identifies his major themes, and analyzes his experiments with language. In Understanding Donald Barthelme, Trachtenberg introduces readers to Barthelme's ultimately affirmative humour and the wry acknowledgment of the conditions out of which it emerges.

Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision (review)

Reviewed by: Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision Robert D. Newman Lance Olsen . Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1990. 172 pp. $34.95. Lance Olsen continues the investigation of postmodernism he began in Ellipse of Uncertainty: An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy. This time his focus is postmodernism's comic vision, which he properly sets in the tradition of Menippean satire and the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, in polyphonic structures that Northrop Frye has labeled "encyclopaedic farragoes." Olsen articulates the interrelation of stylistic heteroglossia and parodic humor typically foregrounded in postmodern fiction as a means of undermining the authoritative structures a reader brings to a text. To do this, he traces degrees and variations of this occurrence in an interesting range of writers. In Guy Davenport's collection of short stories, Da Vinci's Bicycle, Olsen finds a late modernist who possesses both modernism's attempt at "a renaissance of the archaic" and postmodernism's commentary on the failure of that attempt. The choice of the frequently neglected Davenport is an apt one for Olsen to draw his distinctions and mark the sites of transgression. However, his contention that modernism tends to marginalize the humorous itself marginalizes the foremost of modernists, Joyce. Olsen continues to locate the transition from and attack on modernist assumptions in Nabokov's Lolita and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. In his analysis of these two "Janus-texts," Olsen sometimes forgets the roots of postmodernism he had worked to establish in his initial chapter, particularly when he isolates the fantastic as a postmodern metagenre. Beckett's How It Is and Donald Barthelme's work present Olsen opportunities to focus and elaborate on the postmodern comic vision he seeks to explain. Along with Thomas Pynchon, who lurks in the background of much of Olsen's discussion, these writers self-consciously twist their readers' linguistic sensibilities and parodically deconstruct culturally inscribed means of ordering and knowing. Unfortunately, much of what Olsen offers has been presented elsewhere, often with more depth. In the 1980s, Olsen sees the turn to political neoconservatism marginalizing the postmodern comic vision. A deft analysis of Walter Abish's How German Is It presents an unconscious movement from what Olsen terms "postmodern orthodoxy," an oxymoronic choice of words given his earlier insistence on the protean heterodoxy of postmodernism. D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel provides his other test case for the contemporary shift from postmodernism to pragmatism. In aligning neoconservatism and pragmatism, Olsen forgets that pragmatism, in America at least, was a consistently liberal ideology. He also asserts that The While Hotel begins as a humorous text, a questionable assessment at best of this novel of horror and holocaust. Despite the above mentioned flaws, Circus of the Mind in Motion is stylistically engaging and offers a good general introduction to many of the premises which critics have linked together to mean postmodernism. Olsen's investigations of Davenport and Abish are particularly useful. However, his reminder that postmodernism is an attitude rather than a historical period is one that he might have heeded more consistently. [End Page 359] Robert D. Newman Texas A&M University Copyright © 1991 Purdue Research Foundation

'weeping map intense activity din': Reading Donald Barthelme

A tin frying pan; a hollow-core door in birch veneer on black wrought-iron legs; a woven straw wastebasket; a Yugoslavian carved flute, wood, dark brown—items to be found among the components of a barricade in Donald Barthelme's story 'The Indian Uprising.' The specificity of his catalogue discloses rich diversity concealed by the stark, utilitarian designation, 'barricade,' in accordance with Barthelme's understanding of the role of art as enrichment and complication of our perception of the world and of our relation to it. A movement away from generality towards particularity is characteristic of his varied and unpredictable fiction, and direction of our attention to the particular often involves, necessarily, subversion of the reductive artifice of linguistic construction by means of which we order the barrage of experiential data generated in the culture of mass production and mass media. His work counters the radical simplifications of our age, and this entails disruption of the contours of 'realist' fiction and its assumption that language has transparency and innocence. Through the interstices of his literary architecture (which is purposefully ramshackle), we may glimpse the writer in action, selecting materials, locating that quirky emphasis upon which the humour and trenchant irony of his fiction largely depend. The composition of Barthelme's stories is undisguisedly an assemblage in print of words and, on occasion, of pictorial images, forming an addition to the world of things. It does not constitute a frame through which to view the processes of living, nor does it furnish a tool for the analytic detection of meaning, but the perceptibility of its mode of construction stimulates an illuminating reflexivity and may assist in our experience of the specific. It conforms to Victor Shklovsky's dictum that 'Art converts the particularity of things into perceptible form.'

Vile Bodies, Vile Places: Traveling with Granta

Twelve years ago, Granta was nearly defunct student publication named for river in Cambridge, England. Then brash young American named Bill Buford took it over, badgered some well-known writers into contributing, and made deal with Penguin Books to publish the magazine as quarterly paperback. Granta's first Penguin issue carried big names like Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, and John Hawkes; by i985, with issue #i5, Buford had similar agreement with Viking Penguin for U.S. distribution, and Granta was on its way to being one of the most influential literary publications in the English-speaking world. Some of this influence may derive merely from Buford's chutzpah and the power of multinational publishing company, but the magazine is good. First-rate work by writers like Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel, Heinrich Bo511, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez appears regularly in And there's something attractive about Granta's overall shape. magazine takes broad view of what constitutes literature, putting nonfiction like cultural essays and travel writing on equal footing with fiction. Granta assumes easily that writing is international, and that it is, or should be, political. As Buford puts it in the preface to Granta #6, Literature for Politics, Granta seeks a literature that is adversary to oppression and not accomplice to it. In some ways, Granta can claim to have lived up to the straightforward aim of being an adversary of oppression. In issue #I I, Salman Rushdie critiqued neocolonialism with brilliant essay about the fantasized resurgence of the British Raj in TV programs like The Jewel in the Crown, relating that fantasy to actual conditions in Thatcher's England. In #I5, Nadine Gordimer described the writer's responsibility, arguing that art is on the side of the oppressed. A more recent issue (#23) pushed the boundaries of literature and politics by carrying Fawwaz Traboulsi's description of the weapons

The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature Since 1970 ed. by Graham Clarke

164 Western American Literature seem to exhibit more promise than merit, Hanson’s study is certainly a signifi­ cant addition to the innovative critical perspective that Allen has brought to the appreciation of western American literature. That the perspective is now somewhat overburdened by jargon does not diminish the very rich possibilities it suggests. Finally, the most polished of these short studies is Lyman B. Hagen’s Dee Brown. Very evenly paced, succinctly integrating illustrative specifics and more general estimates, it covers all aspects of Brown’s career with equal insight. It manages to convey Brown’s important contributions as a novelist and historian without straining to overstate his stature. It should do much to promote further critical attention to Brown’s work—though other critics will be hard-pressed to match the seamless transitions that characterize Hagen’s treatment. In every sense, this study might serve as a model for what can be accomplished in a seemingly restrictive space. MARTIN KICH Wright State University The New American Writing: Essays on American Literature Since 1970. Edited by Graham Clarke. (London and New York: Vision Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1990. 186 pages, no price given.) “The word ‘new’ seems endemic to American culture,” says Graham Clarke in his introduction to this collection of essays on “The New American Writing,” taken mostly from fellow professors at the University of Kent in Great Britain. Indeed, this particular post-1970 “newness,” which Clarke aptly identifies as the desire to locate oneself in a history that “increasingly seems to overwhelm and threaten,” is the rubric, and paradox, under which this collec­ tion is organized. Attempting to define what is “new” is always tricky business, especially when, as Clarke says, “New is . . . now”; but these essays manage this close proximity well, and are useful not only for their attention to these “new,” often ignored authors, but as a document to be considered in discussions on canon reformation. With specific chapters on E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Raymond Carver, and Gordon Lish, and collective chapters on ethnic fiction and American crime fiction, this collection attempts to place itself at the nexus of popular culture and literature. In doing so in such an “academic” format, The New American Writing asks us to consider our criteria for what we call “literature” and, by extension, to consider the process through which we select new authors into the literary canon. Although the American West as genre is not addressed in this collection, Clarke’s fine essay on Raymond Carver and A. Robert Lee’s chapter on the “Ethnic Renaissance,” which discusses Louise Erdrich and Rudolfo Anaya, may be ofparticular interesthere. Reviews 165 I suppose that in any collection, one could always quibble over those figures not included, and Clarke does concede that this 186 page volume is not meant to be fully representative. However, with his stated emphasis on history and historical representation, the late Donald Barthelme is,perhaps, this collec­ tion’s most conspicuously absent figure. Although this book works admirably within the limitations of length, much more could have been accomplished with the addition of a few more chapters. CHRISTOPHER COATES University of Florida Home to Stay: Asian American Women’s Fiction. Edited by Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac. (Greenfield Center: The Greenfield Review Press, 1990. 321 pages, $12.95.) Watanabe explains that the writers in this anthology are American women of Asian descent or “non-Asian women who have experienced close contact with Asian cultures.” The work includes such celebrated writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Also included are many new writers—some of them in their early 20s—whose works here have not been published before. Of these, Elizabeth Gordon in “On the Other Side of the War: A Story” writes with wry understatement about anAmerican-Vietnamese family made legitimate in West Virginia. The stories are prefaced by brief autobiographical sketches of their authors which are as compelling as the fiction. Gish Jen writes humorously of her cherished nickname which her mother rejects. Sussy Chako writes that she was “born and raised in Hong Kong by immigrant parents who were Indone­ sian citizens of Chinese descent.” Marnie Mueller, a...