PAPER Topics

Start of Term Paper
Barthelme's "The School" is the first postmodernist story I have ever read. When I read it for the first time, my lips formed a bitter smile. In my imagination, postmodernist stories differed from the classical ones in the arrangement of the ....

Middle of Term Paper
... with the idea of rejection, and I find them together everywhere, in every death case. For Barthelme, what is lost is unrecoverable. Pessimism, mostly expressed in taking death naturally, spreads uniformly all over the story, from the first paragraph about the orange trees to the last when the new gerbil enters the classroom. In this school, where the children are supposed to receive education, everything dies. The fish, the salamander, and the orange trees die though children take much care of them. The teacher is pessimistic although life goes on and a new gerbil walks in the school. Edgar says that "life is that which gives mean ...