Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White
The essay examines Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’s from the perspective of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Drawing on a reciprocity between Barthelme’s collage principle and Levinas’s notion of the there is, the paper applies the concept in the analysis of Snow White’s referential and af...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2010-11-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/8732 |
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| Summary: | The essay examines Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’s from the perspective of the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Drawing on a reciprocity between Barthelme’s collage principle and Levinas’s notion of the there is, the paper applies the concept in the analysis of Snow White’s referential and affect construction strategies. The novel is proven to textualize the ethical dimension of Barthelme’s referential uses of language, while the figure of Snow White is demonstrated to be the trope of the referentiality-performativity conflict that lies at the core of a literary collage. The tension between referentiality and performativity is further developed in Barthelme’s novel via the figures of Bill and Paul, who, in the context of Levinas’s concepts of fatigue and indolence respectively, are interpreted as the tropological markers of the temporal mechanism of Snow White’s collage. Accordingly, Bill’s constant weariness is interpreted as a trope of referentiality, and Paul’s inertia as narrating the mechanism of language performatives. Since the suspension between the two tropes propels the text’s constant self-questioning, a process mirroring Levinas’s idea of how ethical subjectivity hypostatically emerges in language as a questioning of its ontological stability, it is argued that the mechanism of subject construction strategy in Snow White follows a similar logic. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |