Tuesday, April 24, 2012





Donald Barthelme, a post-modern writer from the fabulous 60s, is an essential writer in the post-1945 American Literary Cannon. He knows that not-knowing is essential too. Take the journey via the sister website, dbnot-knowing.blogspot.com, to discover the wisdom of the essay "Not-Knowing."  It's about art, after all, the whole modern world.  Shebang!



What is known:


Donald Barthelme became notable in the 1960s as a writer of the advancing post-modern guard.  He wrote many short stories and few novels, and was strongly tied to the New Yorker as the postmodern canon formed.
            Barthelme (born in 1931) grew up in Galveston, Texas to an affluent family. Barthelme grew up in a household designed by his architect father and became interested in modern art and jazz via his parents.  This interest would figure later in life in his experimental writing style.  He eventually enrolled at the University of Houston, and stayed there for a while, editing a lit journal named Forum throughout the late fifties. In the early sixties, Barthelme became the director of Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum and began writing the stories for which he is remembered.  Tracy Daugherty, a Barthelme biographer and former student, links Barthelme's beliefs in contemporary art to those he began to employ in his short fiction.  Barthelme moved to New York in the early sixties, where he became entrenched in the emerging establishment of writers, especially in light of publishing in The New Yorker Magazine.  On the publication of Barthelme's first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, in 1964, Granville Hicks in the Saturday Review declared, "Barthelme is a member of the advance guard, and he is very far out indeed.” He published a novella shortly after this, named Snow White, in 1967.  After this, Barthelme won a Guggenheim award, had some works translated into German and Italian, and began to hit his stride per publication. Between 1968 and 1972 there were three more story collections that contained his lasting work: Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), and Sadness (1972).  Soon after, Barthelme became a renowned writer.  At 39, the experimental writer became a national name.  Due to financial troubles, Barthelme began teaching in New York City. After a time, he grew tired of New York and returned to Houston, retaining a professorship position.  This shift back to Texas coincided with a belief that his literary moment had been passed up with the rise of the “minimalist” short story led by Raymond Carver.  Barthelme spent the remainder of his life as a teacher in Houston and passed away at the age of 58 in 1989.
             
Though Barthelme believed he’d been passed by in the surge of a newer literary movement, there is evidence today that he remains vital and has influenced many contemporary authors.  He had been described by Salman Rushdie as “one of the essential figures of American literature” and by Malcolm Bradbury as “the best of the contemporary American short story writers”.  In The New Fiction, he was called the most imitated fictionist in the United States today.  But his importance and popularity survives beyond his era.  He has been cited as being an evident influence on many writers now in vogue, as figures such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and the late David Foster Wallace have acknowledged.  He remains a frequent subject of scholarly papers.  His experimental style, as well as his general adherence to story-telling and fun, have ensured he has been remembered as a vital postmodernist. Harold Bloom included Barthelme’s The Dead Father and his collection Forty Stories…in The Western Canon.  His adherence to postmodernism and experimentalism have lent him influence over successive generations of writers.  He remains in vogue as a subject of study, and has contributed vital works to the postmodern canon.  Once believing himself to have become obscure and less worthwhile, Barthelme is in fact a pillar of the postmodern repertoire, and remains a subject of study in academic understandings of that literary movement.



...now go discover what is unknown a: dbnot-knowing.blogspot.com. Click on the hyperlinks at the bottom of the posts to make your own way around, choose your own art adventure. The numbered links are direct quotes from "Not-Knowing," and the letters are analysis of Barthelme's groove.