This article is devoted to the analysis of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short stories, Harrison Bergeron, through the setting analysis focusing mainly on the use of media as a means of creating ...mono logical setting and discussing the dance scene as an act of escape from this mono logical setting. Kurt Vonnegut, a contemporary American novelist and short story writer, using his experiences during World War II, reflects on the post war American society especially through his satirical works about power structures. And in this short story he satirizes the forced equality in an imaginary American society.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) illustrates people who become enslaved to a controlling system of cybernetics that enhances its power through computer, consumer culture, and advertising industry ...in postwar America. In this study, I investigate Player Piano through the idea of cybernetics that reduces human beings into intelligent machines and mindless bodies. Player Piano constitutes an effort to make sense of powerful systems through the metaphors of the machine. It is a struggle to illustrate a deterministic attitude of the universe that leaves human with no choice.
Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) was a popular and critical success when it first appeared, and has had a notable impact on popular perceptions of "the bombing of Dresden," although ...it has been criticized by historians because of its inaccuracy. This article analyzes the novel's quirky, comic style and its generic mixture of science fiction and testimony, showing how Vonnegut consistently used ingenuous understatement as a way of imaginatively engaging his readers with the horrors of war. The article argues that the text's aesthetics are closer to those of graphic novels than of realist narratives and that, accordingly, we can understand its cultural impact only by approaching it as a highly artificial linguistic performance with present-day appeal and contemporary relevance, and not merely by measuring the degree to which it gives a full and accurate mimesis of past events. The article uses the case of Vonnegut to advance a more general argument that builds on recent work in cultural memory studies: in order to understand the role that literature plays in shaping our understanding of history, it needs to be analyzed in its own terms and not as a mere derivative of historiography according to a "one model fits all" approach. Furthermore, we need to shift the emphasis from products to processes by considering both artistic and historiographical practices as agents in the ongoing circulation across different cultural domains of stories about the past. Theoretical reflection should account for the fact that historiography and the various arts play distinct roles in this cultural dynamics, and while they compete with one another, they also converge, bounce off one another, influence one another, and continuously beg to be different.
Howard W. Campbell's tale of working as an American double agent during the war years is a fabrication on his part, a lie told to justify his own reprehensible behavior as a Nazi propagandist. The ...revision of memory he undertakes in his confessions ties Campbell to Adolf Eichmann, whose trial was being internationally televised as Vonnegut was finishing the novel, as well as to Nazi collaborators discussed by Primo Levi and other Holocaust historians.
Kurt Vonnegut struggled for years to depict his memories of Dresden's infamous firebombing in 1945, due in part to the fact that no specific medical discourse yet existed regarding psychological ...trauma. This article explores how Vonnegut found a unique way to recount an experience that lies outside the bounds of normative human consciousness by turning to the generic characteristics of science fiction. By paying particular attention to the familiar/unfamiliar binary intrinsic to science fiction, Vonnegut finds the terminology and structure to narrate the bizarre, frightening experience of trauma in general and traumatic memory in particular.
Critical consensus agrees that Slaughterhouse-Five, forty-three years old this year, remains Vonnegut's canon masterpiece. In the 1960s and '70s, the novel was perceived as commenting on World War ...II, America's putative "good" war, through the lens of the controversial Vietnam War and proving that no war is ever fully righteous. Billy Pilgrim's story, an Everyman saga, condemns American apathy and the defeatist notion that the lone individual is the helpless plaything of juggernaut forces. Vonnegut vehemently argues that individual agency can still influence events in humanistic ways. Currently, in post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago. If America's current fascination with apocalyptic scenarios is any indication, the psychological exhaustion of the two-front War on Terror, the economic crisis, and disillusion with a new President's inability to reverse everything overnight has led to a near national death wish.
This essay attempts to situate Vonnegut's novels within the post-WWII milieu arguing that in them Vonnegut has reflected his generation's experiences with the war, the advent and use of the atom ...bomb, the aftermath of the Great Depression and the rise of the consumer society, the Vietnam War, and the weakening of social bonds and institutions after the 1960s. Yet Vonnegut also reflects American optimism: although often disillusioned with his country and fellow countrymen, he refuses to give up on America and tenaciously clings to his dream of a better society, with a genuine culture and a real community. In doing so, he offers alternatives for American society in the twenty-first century.
Katawal explores Michel Foucault's essay "Of Other Spaces", which discusses various types and traits of heterotopias. He considers Foucault's notion of heterotopias as an analytical tool to ...investigate the way how the nation is structured and how it self-sustains. For one, the state's identity depends, among other things, on its citizens' alacrity to conform to established norms, and it deems as deviant those who veer from them. But since the deviants of the nation-state inhabit within it while at the same time refusing to respond to its call to conform, the state labels them as dangerous others. According to Edward Said, these modern state's dangerous others exhibit exilic consciousness, which enables them to be critical of a group, communal or national identity precisely because such exclusionary notion of identity often leads to devastating results. Here, Katawal investigates similar instances of exilic consciousness that appear in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, and William V. Spanos' In the Neighborhood of Zero.
The scholarship focusing on the work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. has largely centered on his novels. Most studies have neglected Vonnegut’s start in the popular magazine market writing short stories. A few ...notable scholars have focused on the stories: Jerome Klinkowitz, Peter J. Reed, Jeff Karon, James Thorson, and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff. Even with the work of such scholars, there have been few studies that consider the context of Vonnegut’s earliest stories and how the influence of the middleclass magazine market not only shaped Vonnegut’s career but had continued impact on his later novels. This study explores Vonnegut’s first eight stories: “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” “Thanasphere,” “EPICAC,” “All the King’s Horses,” “Mnemonics,” “The Euphio Question,” “The Foster Portfolio,” and “More Stately Mansions.” The stories are considered within the context of their first publication venue, the magazine Collier’s, and how that context shows connections between the stories and his novels such as Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five. Understanding this intertextuality provides a deeper understanding of Vonnegut’s larger world of connected themes, characters, and settings.
The Accidental Practitioner Ward, Joseph J.
The Journal of humanistic psychology,
01/2012, Letnik:
52, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Just as psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy have influenced the field of literary studies, literature provides insight about the theories and practices of its sister disciplines. The purpose of ...this article is to demonstrate how literary works of Kurt Vonnegut illuminate principles of the influential branch of psychotherapy known as rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). This article traces the similar philosophies and shared beliefs of Vonnegut and REBT’s founder, Albert Ellis, and details how Ellis’s REBT is illustrated in selected works of Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The article concludes by suggesting that Vonnegut’s works—and the principles of REBT that they illuminate—provide a much needed guide for living in an irrational, often absurd, world.
PDF
