A Study Of Subaltern Of The Novels Of Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme is an American post-modernist writer,whose works were known for the preeminent experimentation,fragmented written language and multivariate literary forms for a long time.But the contents of these works are always ignored on the pretext of the lack of complete plots and full figures,which overlooks Barthelme's attention to real life.In fact,Barthelme was a observer of his time.Politics,arts,social ethos,commodities,the mood and the living conditions of modern people were common objects in his novels.There are also no lack of subaltern images in the novels,which suits the criticism of Gayatri C.Spivak,an Indian scholar working on subaltern.Subaltern has the meanings of subordinate and lieutenant in terms of words.Antonio Gramsci used 'Subaltern' in his 'Selections from Prison Notebooks' for the first time,referring to the unorganized bottom farmers in southern Italy.Subaltern Studies School used the word 'Subaltern' to refer to the oppressed underclass after India's independence,which further emphasized the subordination meaning of the word.In Spivak's opinions,the meaning of subaltern was expanded to be a sliding signifier,which was flexibly used in various contexts to refer to the subject of the oppressed.Spivak published the thesis 'Can the Subalterns Speak?' in 1988,which cogitated the dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze,the research and the approaches of Subaltern Studies School and the problem of 'sati',pointing that subaltern cannot speak of the oppression of hegemony and the re-representation of elite intellectuals.Otherwise,Spivak had also introduced feminism and translation politics into the research of subaltern.The subaltern images in Barthelme's work meet the definition of subaltern of Spivak.They are oppressed for some marginalized elements of their own,or being re-represented by mainstream intellectuals,or giving up the desire of speaking for the mirror effect of 'the other',and being silent as a result.On this issue,Spivak emphasized the important role of education in constructing the subjectivity of subalterns and resisting the mirror image of the others.Besides,she believed that the postcolonial traps often hidden in English translations of the third world text,calling'for vigilance and attention.To some extent,Spivak's plan has contributed to the coping of subaltern problems,but it is often difficult to carry out under realistic conditions.While Barthelme advocated a kind of resistance and self construction in the sense of behavior from the perspective of subalterns,and insisted on the discourse of resistance.As the problem of representation and re-representation,Barthelme avoided a direct endorsement of any certain class.With irony,parody,and strangeness,he came to distance himself from the hegemonic class,subalterns or spokesmen.Conversely,Barthelme re-represented the social phenomenon of the oppression and deception of representation,which made a progressive attempt on how the western mainstream writers can avoid the trap of centralism and deal with the texts of subalterns properly.