Yesterday in class we examined Donald Barthelme’s “The School” as a potential subject for your final essay and annotated bibliography. If you choose to write about his short story, your bibliographic entry for your primary source would follow this model:
Barthelme, Donald. “The School.” The Best American Short Stories 1975, edited by Martha Foley. Houghton Mifflin, 1975. pp. 8-11.
Donald Barthelme’s postmodern short story “The School” recounts a series of classroom lessons that end with the deaths of plants and animals–deaths that serve as a prelude to the unexplained death of a Korean orphan, followed by a surge in deaths of classmates and family members. First published in The New Yorker magazine in 1974, “The School” was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 1975.
“The School”‘s unreliable narrator, it’s shift in fictional mode, and its dark humor combine to create an ideal introduction to postmodern fiction. Researchers interested in exploring how literary scholars have interpreted Barthelme’s story may draw on the details of the narrative to examine how their own analyses of Bartheleme’s postmodernism align with or diverge from their own. They may also look to the story’s particulars as hallmarks of the author’s style in particular or postmodernism in general.
Donald Barthelme taught creative writing at Boston University, SUNY Buffalo, and the City College of New York, where he served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974 to 1975. He was the author of four novels and a dozen short story collections, including Sixty Stories, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Next Up
In class on Wednesday, you will receive your final essay and annotated bibliography assignment, you will conduct a short interview with a classmate, and you will compose your first annotation. Details TBA.
Jane Lucas 