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@article{210291,
        author = {Mr. M. Naresh Kumar and Dr. R. S. Baskkaran},
        title = {“Dead, but Still with Us”: Citation, Repetition, and the Afterlife of Paternal Authority in Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {6},
        pages = {440-446},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=210291},
        abstract = {Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father (1975) opens with a paradox that the novel never fully resolves. Its giant father is dead, yet he talks, commands, boasts, and sulks his way across the countryside toward his own grave. Critics have read him as an image of patriarchy, of totalizing meaning, of the Lacanian law, and of postmodern play with language. These readings are valuable, but they mostly explain what the father stands for. They say less about how his power keeps working once his body has failed. This paper argues that Barthelme presents paternal authority as a discursive structure that survives through repetition and citation. Drawing on Judith Butler’s idea of citationality, Michel Foucault’s account of productive power, and Jacques Derrida’s concept of iterability, it reads the father’s speech, the embedded “A Manual for Sons,” and the final burial as stages of a single process. The effort to bury the father, it concludes, repeats his discourse even as it lays his body to rest.},
        keywords = {Donald Barthelme; The Dead Father; Paternal Authority; Citationality; Iterability; Postmodern American Fiction},
        month = {November},
        }