THE PECULIARITIES OF DONALD BARTHELME’S POSTMODERN STYLE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF A COLLECTION «SIXTY STORIES»)

Abstract

The author analyzes the elements of postmodernism in D. Barthelme’s collection «Sixty Stories». It is determined that this stylistic dominant in the writer’s prose is mainly determined by such parameters as irony, collage and play. In addition, the genre specificity of his postmodern worldview is important, because it was in short epic genres that Barthelmi was able to realize his own aesthetic vision of literature in the second half of the XXth century. The writer experimented with form and content, seeking to adapt the poetic works of Thomas Stearns Eliot and the dramatic conflicts of Samuel Beckett, that is, to rethink the innovation of modernist authors to a new socio-historical situation. Barthelme uses almost all forms of humor, but the most common is irony. The ironic reappraisal of values in postmodernism ends with everything depreciating and becoming invaluable. The lists of catalogs in Barthelme’s texts are often presented as collages, and these collages are mostly made of verbal dreck (mass literature) and visual garbage. The situation in his texts is related to the need to react to an incomprehensible event, which forms a kind of Beckettian plot, when there is a consequence, but the reason is unclear, and plot is rather formalistic.