ellauri069.html on line 54: Barthelme was a Texan. He grew up in Houston, where his father, also named Donald, was a prominent local architect. Donald the writer was the first of five children. Four were boys, and three of them became professional writers.
ellauri069.html on line 59: Barthelmes were Catholics; some lapsed, some not, and then to the University of Houston, where his father was a professor in the architecture department, but from which he dropped out.
ellauri069.html on line 67: Their memoir is an attempt to understand their gambling obsession as a way of coping with guilt over his death. “The addiction to gambling, with the unsuccessful struggles to break the habit and the opportunities it affords for self-punishment, is a repetition of the compulsion to masturbate,” Freud says in “Dostoevsky and Parricide”; “the relation between efforts to suppress it and fear of the father are too well known to need more than a mention.” No one believes Freud anymore, of course. A great deal of his writing is, at one level of explicitness or another, about the authority of fathers and the struggle for autonomy. (And Barthelme was a close reader of Freud.)
ellauri069.html on line 76: A couple of years after Barthelme took the apartment, the writer Kirkpatrick Sale and his wife, Faith, an editor, moved in downstairs and became close friends. They had been students at Cornell with Pynchon, and Pynchon would write part of “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973) in their apartment.
ellauri069.html on line 78: What was he doing? Daugherty is right to claim that Barthelme conceived of himself as an heir of the modernist tradition—in particular, of Beckett. He encountered Beckett’s work for the first time in 1956, when he picked up a copy of Theatre Arts at Guy’s Newsstand, in Houston, and read the text of “Waiting for Godot.” “It seemed that from the day he discovered ‘Godot,’ Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined,” the woman who was his wife at the time, Helen Moore Barthelme, says in her memoir, “Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound” (2001).
ellauri069.html on line 87: Barthelme vietti elämänsä 8 viimeistä vuotta kurkkusyöpäsenä takas Houstonissa saatuaan potkut New Yorkerista kai. Sen elämäkerturi Daugherty oli sen luovan kirjoituxen kurssin oppilaita siellä. Se kuoli 58-vuotiaana 1989. Varmaan poltti piippua. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
ellauri069.html on line 89: Barthelme believed himself to be working in the tradition of Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and that his appropriation of popular, commercial, and other sub-artistic elements (instruction manuals, travel guides, advertisements, sentences from newspaper articles, and so on) in his writing was done as a means of making literature, not subverting it or announcing its obsolescence. Daugherty thinks that many people have got Barthelme wrong.
ellauri069.html on line 91: Barthelme incorporates bits from other people’s texts into his stories, and a good deal of his writing sounds like (and some of it plainly is) pastiche, as though it had been composed in the style, or spoken in the voice, of someone else.
ellauri069.html on line 93: It can certainly look, in short, as though Barthelme, like Warhol, were simply dropping the question of whether something counts as literature or not, since markers of the literary are impossible to find in his writing. The high-art traditionalist has no place to hang his beret. Daugherty’s purpose is to convince us that this was not Barthelme’s intention.
ellauri069.html on line 95: Barthelme felt that American fiction had abandoned what modernists called “the revolution of the word.” “Fiction after Joyce seems to have devoted itself to propaganda, to novels of social relationships, to short stories constructed mousetrap-like to supply, at the finish, a tiny insight typically having to do with innocence violated, or to works written as vehicles for saying no! in thunder,” he wrote in 1964, in the second issue (there would be only two) of Location.
ellauri069.html on line 115: “The aim of literature,” says a character in “Florence Green Is 81,” one of Barthelme’s first published stories, “is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
ellauri069.html on line 120: He thought S. J. Perelman was a genius. Perelman, sadly, did not think much of Barthelme’s work.
ellauri090.html on line 338: Influenciou grandes nomes das letras, como Olavo Bilac, Lima Barreto, Drummond de Andrade, John Barth, Donald Barthelme e muitos outros.
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