Home > Language, Literature > Vol 1 No 1 July 2013 Abstract 3
Language and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White
Mrs. Shaghayegh Mohammadi
International Journal of Language and Literature, 1(1), 15-25.

Abstract
The current study assessed Donald Barthelme’s Snow White which shares a new version of our language world. This postmodern novel illustrates different plays of language, in that different problems get originated. The first problem is the heap of words which change their sanctity to a second handed commodity. Words which are once the base of every fiction’s coherence are now just at the center to fill up but not to fulfill anything. Then self and personality lack and at last the endlessness and the circularity of any structure which is built by language. The essay, through its invented world of nothing/everything, tries to open a new outlook toward language which was hidden in a labyrinth of its own plays. In the meantime, it reaches to a point that its language decenters everything. Although different critics have investigated language in many respects through this novel, the essay utilizes a new perspective toward the problems originated from language plays to generate a modern world called “world of nothing”. On the other hand, the main purpose is not to search the philosophical aspects and explanations of Barthelme’s Snow White, but discussing the role of language through a literary text. In conclusion, the study will show how deconstruction reading strategy is deconstructed for it uses the same medium as language. Finally, it asks how a literary text and its reading strategy can be against themselves and stand at the threshold of new meanings and interpretations.

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Mohammadi, Shaghayegh Mrs. (2013). Language and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White. International Journal of Language and Literature, 1(1), 15-25.

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Shaghayegh Mohammadi is a Masters’ degree holder in English Language and Literature. She earns her M.A. at Azad Tehran University. Her project was about Deconstructive Reading Strategy on postmodern fictions. She devotes her emphasis on deconstructive aspects of Donald Barthelme’s Short Fictions and his Novel “Snow White”. She is extending her career as a lecturer in Iran, Isfahan University of Technology and she has had this opportunity to extend her career by lecturing to the several age groups of pupils at private universities and schools in Iran and Malaysia. Her expertise is majorly on postmodern fictions and criticism. Her favorite critic is Jacques Derrida and she admires works of Donald Barthelme as postmodern fiction author. She has proposed a new world (world of nothing) in literature through her published paper. Most of her publications imply postmodernist criticism and fictions which is the interest of her study.