The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme's Work

• Thesis title in Czech: Hledání smyslu v díle Donalda Barthelmeho
• Thesis title in English: The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme's Work
• Key words: Donald Barthelme|smysl|metafikce|neurčitost|postmoderna
• English key words: Donald Barthelme|meaning|metaficition|indeterminacy|postmodernism
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2018/2019
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: Mgr. David Vichnar, Ph.D.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 10.10.2018
• Date of assignment: 10.10.2018
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 22.10.2018
• Date and time of defence: 18.06.2020 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 26.05.2020
• Date of proceeded defence: 18.06.2020
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.

Guidelines

Donald Barthelme is known for his fragmentary, disjointed and collage-like narratives centred around bizarre and surreal situations. Mostly associated with the American metafictional tradition prominent from the 1960s, Barthelme’s work is often self-conscious, aware of its own status as fiction, examining not only the boundaries between different ontological levels of fiction and reality, but also questioning the boundaries between meaning and its absence and subsequently contemplating the status of the literary work itself. Focusing primarily on the short stories from his collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987) and the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), the aim of the thesis will be to examine three different levels of Barthelme’s texts which are concerned with meaning or its absence. On the level of content, Barthelme’s characters often search for a meaning and try to interpret the fragmentary, often absurd and surreal experience they are confronted with. The intentionally awkward language often saturated with clichés seems to be deteriorating and losing its referential quality. The characters, being unable to interpret signs and find meaning in the fragmentary experience, find themselves feeling the sense of unsatisfactory ambiguity and indeterminacy. Similar principle then also occurs on the level of interpreting Barthelme’s texts. The readers are often confronted with seemingly random fragments and find themselves in a situation similar to the characters, attempting to find a meaning in the plurality of possible interpretations without reaching a coherent understanding. Nevertheless, the absence of a coherent meaning is in itself a sort of meaning as the act of interpretation becomes parallel to the theme of search for meaning found on the level of content. Meaning is also questioned on the textual level, considering that the metafictional nature of many of Barthelme’s texts doubts its own meaning and becomes what Harold Rosenberg termed an “anxious object,” a piece of art which is uncertain of its status as art. It questions its meaning either by explicit comments about itself or implicitly through confrontation with previous literary forms and popular culture. The thesis will first attempt to examine the characters’ search for meaning, the deterioration of language and the loss of referentiality in their utterances. Second, it will suggest possible interpretative approaches and the way in which they participate in the creation of a meaning. Last but not least, the thesis will attempt to analyse the form and self-conscious nature of the texts and the way in which it corresponds to meaning and its absence on the level of the content and the reader’s perception.

References

Barthelme, Donald. The Dead Father. New York: Pocket Books, 1975.
–––. Forty Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2005.
–––. Not-Knowing. New York: Random House, 1997.
–––. Sixty Stories. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
–––. Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1978.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1991.
McCaffery, Larry. “Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelme’s Fictions,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 13, no. 1, 1979: 69-79. JSTOR <www.jstor.org/stable/3332090>.
–––. “Donald Barthelme and the Metafictional Muse,” SubStance, vol. 9, no. 2, 1980: 75-88. JSTOR <www.jstor.org/stable/3683881>.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1987.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 1984.