唐纳德·巴塞尔姆

唐纳德·巴塞尔姆（Donald Barthelme，1931年4月7日—1989年7月23日）是美国后现代主义小说家，代表作是《白雪公主》。他一生写了大量的短篇小说，并曾从事新闻记者、杂志编辑等工作，并曾在纽约城市大学任教。

虽然以短篇小说闻名，巴塞尔姆一生中亦著有四部中长篇小说：《白雪公主》（Snow White），《死去的父亲》（The Dead Father），《天堂》（Paradise）以及 The King。他的一百多篇短篇收集在 《Come Back, Dr. Caligari》、 《Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts》《City Life》和《Sadness》等书中。另外，它的大部分作品汇集在了《故事六十篇》（Sixty Stories）和《故事四十篇》（Forty Stories）之中。巴塞尔姆还著有一些非小说书籍，如：《Guilty Pleasures》、《Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme》。并和女儿一道写了儿童文学作品《The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine》，并因此在1972年获得美国国家图书奖。

巴塞尔姆的短篇小说以偶然性和片段化为主导，传统的完整叙事结构并不常见。某些作品摒弃了传统的散文技巧，融入了大量的非语言元素，例如晦涩的意像或单一的色域。评论界对他的评价两极分化。赞赏者认为巴塞尔姆的散文独具匠心，富有洞察力，而批评者则认为其晦涩难懂。美国后现代主义文学将他视为最重要的贡献者之一。

Donald Barthelme Jr. (pronounced BAR-thəl-mee; April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Early life

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later and Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later study journalism. Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston. (Barthelme also attended St. Thomas Catholic High School in Houston.)

In 1951, as a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Two years later, Barthelme was drafted into the U.S. Army, arriving in Korea on July 27, 1953, the day of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement, which ended the Korean War. Assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division, he served briefly as the editor of an Army newspaper and the Public Information Office of the Eighth Army before returning to the United States and his job at the Houston Post.

At that time, he continued his studies at the University of Houston studying philosophy and founded a literary journal called Forum, which published many future "big names" including Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Marshall McLuhan, and William H. Gass. Although Barthelme continued to take classes until 1957, he never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in Houston's Black jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelley, an experience that influenced his later writing.

Career

Barthelme went on to teach for brief periods at Boston University, University at Buffalo, and the City College of New York, where he served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974 to 1975.

Writing

In 1961 he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; he published his first short story the same year. His New Yorker publication, "L'Lapse", a parody of Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), followed in 1963. The magazine would go on to publish much of Barthelme's early output, including such now-famous stories as "Me and Miss Mandible", the tale of a 35-year-old sent to elementary school by either a clerical error, failing at his job as an insurance adjuster, or failing in his marriage. Written in October 1960, it was the first of his stories to be published. "A Shower of Gold", another early short story, portrays a sculptor who agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? In 1964, Barthelme collected his early stories in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of the short story form. His style—fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman-inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"—spawned a number of imitators and helped to define the next several decades of short fiction.