Barthelme, Donald - Larry McCaffery (essay date 1982)
Larry McCaffery (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: McCaffery, Larry. “Donald Barthelme: The Aesthetics of Trash.” In The Metafictional Muse: The Worlds of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass, pp. 99-149. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.
[In the following excerpt, McCaffery focuses on the “metafictional interests” of Barthelme's short fiction.]
The final possibility is to turn ultimacy, exhaustion, paralyzing self-consciousness and the adjective weight of accumulating history … to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new.
—John Barth, “Title”
After a life rich in emotional defeats, I have looked around for other modes of misery, other roads to destruction. Now I limit myself to listening to what people say, and thinking what pamby it is, what they say. My nourishment is refined from the...
[The entire page is 9550 words long]
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