Reminder: Final Paper Due Monday

You're more than welcome to hand your papers in tomorrow, but the final deadline is Monday at 5PM. Please leave your essays in my box in the English Dept. mailroom (McMicken 241) in the appropriate folder for your class, making sure that they're stapled, and that, in accordance with MLA guidelines, your name appears on each page. Late papers will lose a full letter grade for each day until they're handed in, and papers which fail to meet the length requirements will automaticaly receive an F.

For tomorrow, please read the two-page essay by Barthelme, and come prepared for an overview discussion of our work this quarter. We'll revisit some of the key ideas of postmodernism, make comparisons between authors, and talk about the books you really loved and really hated. I'll also give recommendations for further reading. We've had a great quarter, with some wonderfully engaged conversations about the texts, and I'm hoping we'll have one last chat which will frame everything we've done over the last ten weeks.

Reminder: Barthelme Quiz Monday

Please don't forget that we'll be having our final quiz of the quarter on Monday. This one will only cover the stories you'll be reading for Monday's class, which will hopefully, given the small body of texts, be an opportunity for you to pull up your final grade. Those stories, all of which are in Sixty Stories, are:

• At the End of the Mechanical Age (267)
• Rebecca (275)
• The Captured Woman (280)
  
• I Bought a Little City (290)
  
• The Sergeant (297)
  
• The School (304)
  
• The Great Hug (308)
  
• Our Work and Why We Do It (312)
• The New Music (332)
  
• The Zombies (345)

Reminder: Quiz Wednesday + Barthelme Links

Don't forget that we'll begin Wednesday's class with a quick quiz mostly covering The Dead Father, with a little bit of Sixty Stories thrown in (three or four of them, to be exact). As I said in Monday's class, we'll have two last quizes this week and next, so that folks who weren't happy with their performance on them so far have a chance to pull their grades up a little bit. Next week's will focus solely on Sixty Stories.

That having been said, here are a few links to broaden your experience of Donald Barthelme's work.

Essentials first:

• Jessamyn West's barthelmismo is without a doubt the most thorough web resource for Barthelme's writing on the web, including numerous complete stories, excerpts from larger works, essays on Barthelme, etc. On her YouTube channel, you can also hear her read a number of Barthelme stories.
• Louis Menand's "Saved From Drowning," a recent review of Hiding Man, a new Barthelme biography (named after a story from his debut collection) and a reappraisal of his writing career, is a must-read, particularly for the way in which it frames the dynamics between modernism and postmodernism in his work.
  
• Another great site, albeit a rather specialized one, is A Donald Barthelme Collection, which showcases the many different covers for all of Barthelme's books, as well as some rare publications and broadsides. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a little while.
  

Here are some links from The New York Times:

• Barthelme's obituary, from July 24, 1989
• A tribute to Barthelme, from another postmodern titan, John Barth
• "The Way of Don B.," Lisa Zeidner's appraisal, nearly a decade after his death
• the Times' review of Sixty Stories
  

A handful of other links:

• New York reviews Flying to America, a 2007 volume of Barthelme's final uncollected stories.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer's review of Hiding Man
• The Buffalo News reviews the same
• Donald Antrim reads "I Bought a Little City" (which you'll be reading next week) on this New Yorker podcast

Finally, here's a wonderfully dated public service announcement from MTV's golden age, in which Timothy Hutton reads from Forty Stories' "Chablis":



Now go "feed your head," y'all!