Missing page 305 / As the title of this thesis indicates, this work is a study of key psychoanalytic issues deemed to be central to a proper appreciation of the work of the contemporary American writer, Donald Barthelme. Much has been written about Barthelme's fiction in recent years (he has, for example, been the subject of four full-length studies in the last five years), but the approach taken by criticism in general to his work misinterprets what seems to me to be one of the most interesting and relevant issues raised by his work. Conventional wisdom assumes that Barthelme's short stories represent a uniquely successful challenge to the notion that fiction need embody meanings which originate in the author. It is asserted, in other words, that Barthelme's fiction has for all intents and purposes utterly subverted potential criticism which might attempt to establish a relationship between text and author. In the effective absence of an "author," Barthelme's prose is taken to represent a radically innovative form of discourse, a form of discourse which has influenced an entire generation of experimental writing. The context in which Barthelme's fiction is appreciated by criticism is informed by distinctively postmodern aesthetics. In particular, what critics identify as postmodernism's emphasis on "an aesthetic of process" (Hutcheon 1985, 2) has served to throw the entire concept of the artist or the author as the source of meaning in a text open to serious question. Postmodern fiction presents itself as a form of situation, a variety of experience in which author and reader are free to recreate meaning and recreate themselves in a dynamic gestalt through the process of text. What is most repugnant to postmodernism is the rule of definitions of the self that are anterior to the text, definitions that limit the existential freedom of the self to recreate itself in situation. Barthelme's fiction is widely proclaimed to be exemplary postmodern writing in the sense that it has created a form of discourse in which the author--a potentially limiting source of prefigured meanings--is effectively absent from the text, and can therefore be discounted as a factor in any interpretation of the meaning of the text. This study will show that the voice of the author in Barthelme's short fiction is neither absent nor as irrelevant as criticism would have us believe. Indeed, this study will show that Barthelme's fiction says essentially the opposite of what has hitherto been assumed with regard to the relevance of the authorial voice to the meaning of the fiction. This study is psychoanalytic in the sense that it will isolate the latent features of Barthelme's prose based on readings of patterns of association as they occur in the manifest content of the stories. To this point no criticism has considered the relevance of these patterns of association in Barthelme because it has been assumed that, in the absence of a legitimate authorial voice in his work, such patterns either do not exist, or if they do exist, they were deliberately woven into the fabric of the prose by an ironic author familiar with Freud. With a careful and comparative analysis of his earliest stories to serve as a reference point, this study proposes to demonstrate basically two things: first, that Barthelme's fictions have from the beginning implicitly affirmed the notion that an understanding of the psychoanalytic issues attached to the voice behind the fiction has been crucial to an appreciation of the full meaning of any given story; and second, that the psychoanalytic issues of concern to the authorial voice in Barthelme have not changed to any significant degree over the twenty years Barthelme has been publishing fiction. The implications of the latter point are especially worth noting: proof of the presence of a consistent authorial voice would require a radical readjustment to the popular view of the meaning of Barthelme's fiction. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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.

Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Mayence, Allemagne--Universität Mainz. / Bibliogr. p. 231-242.

Zugl.: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 2002

Texte remanié de: Diss. Ph. D.--University of Sussex, 1989.

Thesis Abstract The present thesis investigates correlations between a selection of metafictional texts and narrative theory. The selection consists in two sets of self-reflexive texts. The first one explores metafictional tendencies in the 17th and 18th century novels. To achieve this, the selection largely ignores their provenience. In addition to Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, it also examines Cervantes's Don Quixote. The latter set of texts focuses on post-War American metafictions (John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five). These represent a coherent body of works from a particular period. Metafiction is generally understood as fiction about fiction. The present thesis challenges those assumptions and suggests interpreting metafiction within the framework of Michel Foucault's epistemes. Metafiction is not conceived of as a separate genre of literature but in the context of broader cultural tendencies in the understanding of representation. Representation is a key concept in metafiction and the increasing degree of narrative self-awareness is viewed in this light. The thesis emphasizes this contrastive and interdisciplinary approach. The text is divided into five chapters. Chapter one is a theoretical...

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.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DXN095779.

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 Rosenberg’s 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.

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.