Donald Barthelme was one of the founders of the Creative Writing program at the University of Houston: he also remains one of the most influential experimental fiction writers of the twentieth century. Though criticism of Barthelme from within the academy has tended to focus on his few novels, like Snow White and The Dead Father, he was, first and foremost, a champion of the short story. He published an average of four stories a year in The New Yorker between 1961 and 1989 and his formal and stylistic modes of experimentation--equal parts profane and reverent, blue collar and academic, funny and terrifically sad--have continued to influence short story writers like George Saunders, Dave Eggers, and Lydia Davis. In reading Barthelme, one cannot but feel that there may be something inherently experimental about the short story form itself. 

This seminar aims to foster, through the work and legacy of Donald Barthelme, new conversations surrounding experimental prose, growing theories of the short story, and the greater legacy of that which we call the postmodern upon contemporary short fiction. How might we upset typical critical engagements with Barthelme's work? How might we better understand the formal experimentations of the postwar years in relation to the growing development of short story conventions? How has the disintegration of the larger literary magazine market shifted the field for contemporary experimental writers? 

Some possible topics might be, but are certainly not limited to:

• The short fiction of Donald Barthelme
• Barthelme and his contemporaries, like William H. Gass, Robert Coover, Kathy Acker, etc.
• The use of fragmentation, collage, and humor in short stories
• Contemporary literary legacies of surrealism
• The role of magazine culture in the growth of experimental short fiction
• Genre hybridity and multimodality
• Digital fiction; experimental fictions of the twentieth century
• Experimental short fiction outside the United States
• The processes of translating experimental prose.