Avant-garde recovery : political moments of Donald Barthelme

The paper focuses on the literary strategy of Donald Barthelme (presented as a model post-modern artist), in particular his attitude to the avant-garde heritage. The author of Snow White excels in parody, by repeating the avant-garde project with a significant different, which carries a critical distance. He continues the tradition of innovative prose (a peculiar understanding of artistic work as a domain of inventiveness and transgression), but at that, he repeats the gesture of breaking up (with aesthetic and political utopias). He denies the transfer from the form to a specific effect projected by avant-garde, and therefore a specific connection of autonomy and commitment. Literature is restored to a separated zone where there are no limits to experiments, the subversive potential of which cannot be contained. This autonomy turns out to be a condition of political character, defined by Jacques Rancière as tearing the community matter and discovery that a different world exists