Donald Barthelme Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Domini

Critical Essay by John Domini

SOURCE: Domini, John. “Donald Barthelme: The Modernist Uprising.” Southwest Review 75, no. 1 (winter 1990): 95-112.

In the following essay, Domini explores Barthelme's modern consciousness through an examination of his short stories.

“Barthelme has managed to place himself,” William Gass once declared, “in the center of modern consciousness.” Gass of course meant “modern” in the sense of “up to the minute”; he was praising Donald Barthelme for what always strikes one first about this author's highly imaginative and wickedly ironic fiction, namely, its free-wheeling use of contemporary culture in all its kitschy largesse. The majority of his closer critics—Tony Tanner, Wayne B. Stengel, and Larry McCaffery, to name three—have since seconded Gass's judgment, emphasizing what that early reviewer called the author's “need for the new.” In general the criticism has stressed how Barthelme revels in the dreck of contemporary culture—how he delights in our brokeback and hopelessly modish contemporary language—using...
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