Barthelme, Donald - Brian McHale and Moshe Ron (essay date summer 1991)
Brian McHale and Moshe Ron (essay date summer 1991)
SOURCE: McHale, Brian, and Ron, Moshe. “On Not-Knowing How to Read Barthelme's ‘The Indian Uprising.’” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 2 (summer 1991): 50-68.
[In the following essay, McHale and Ron describe the difficulties of collaborating on a close reading of “The Indian Uprising.”]
The writer is a man who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.
—Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing”
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When, early in 1989, the two of us began to collaborate on a project involving Barthelme's story “The Indian Uprising,” we both knew and did not know what to do. We knew we wanted to undertake a close reading of “The Indian Uprising,” for reasons we could specify: because critics have tended to shy away from fine-grained, continuous analysis of postmodernist texts, with the implication—perhaps inadvertent but in any...
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