Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author of short fiction and novels. He also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961-1962), and a professor at various universities.

Style and legacy

Barthelme's short stories are often exceptionally compact (a form sometimes called "short-short story," "flash fiction," or "sudden fiction"), often focusing only on incident rather than complete narratives. (He did, however, write some longer stories with more traditional narrative arcs.) At first, these stories contained short epiphanic moments. Later in his career, the stories were not consciously philosophical or symbolic. His fiction had its admirers and detractors, being hailed as profoundly disciplined or derided as meaningless and academic postmodernism.

Related Topics:
Flash fiction - Epiphanic - Symbol

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Barthelme's stories typically avoid traditional plot structures, relying instead on a steady acculumation of seemingly-unrelated detail. By subverting the reader's expectations through constant non sequiturs, Barthelme creates a hopelessly fragmented verbal collage reminiscent of such modernist works as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses. Certain parallels have also been drawn between Barthelme and Franz Kafka. However, Barthelme's fundamental skepticism and irony distanced him from the modernist's belief in the power of art to reconstruct society, leading most critics to class him as a postmodernist writer.

Related Topics:
Non sequitur - Modernist - T.S. Eliot - The Waste Land - James Joyce - Ulysses - Franz Kafka - Irony - Postmodernist

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Barthelme's legacy as an educator lives on at the University of Houston, where he founded the prestigious Creative Writing Program. Authors who were influenced by Barthelme at Houston include novelist Robert Clark Young.

Related Topics:
University of Houston - Robert Clark Young

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Donald Barthelme's brothers Frederick (1943 - ) and Steven (1947- ) are also respected fiction writers and teachers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Related Topics:
Frederick - 1943 - Steven - 1947 - University of Southern Mississippi

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