Glass Mountain （二）学生.docVIP

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) 1. Life Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Houston, Texas. He served in the Army in the early 1950s. When he got down from the plane to join the Korean War, an armistice agreement was just signed. He attended the University of Houston and later was appointed director of the Houston Museum. He became a reporter and editor before he went to New York City where he worked as a professor of creative writing at the New York City College. His pictorial collages were frequently published in newspapers and magazines. 2. Literary Career Beginning in 1963, most of his short stories first appeared in the New Yorker. Therefore, it is no exaggeration to say that the New Yorker helped him establish his reputation as a great postwar writer in America. Barthelme felt that a crisis was at hand for society and for literature, and that all forms of dogma, convention, and covert ideology needed to be reexamined, exposed as artifices, and replaced if necessary by fresher systems more suitable to the times. He rejected conventions of plot and characterization and made little attempt to mirror reality. Therefore, he included fragments, pictures, questionnaires, catalogues, collages, captions of various sizes, but still maintained his commitment to a world out of joint. In his fiction parody is evidently his second trick, though played very effectively. Snow White (1967) is an absurdist dissection of fairy tale which won him the National Award. Barthelme took advantage of the famous fairy tale of the same title and warped (distorted) it in a degraded modern setting. The innocent Snow White becomes a vulgar housewife who keeps promiscuous relations with seven dwarfs. By applying parody, the novel satirizes modern society which blemishes the romantic innocence of the fairy tale. The frequent narration is made up of word games and random allusions to both literature and popular culture, taking the disintegration of language as