KURT VONNEGUT AN INTRODUCTION TO POSTMODERNSIM KURT VONNEGUT

KURT VONNEGUT & AN INTRODUCTION TO POSTMODERNSIM

KURT VONNEGUT • American author with a career spanning over 50 years • Published 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays, and five works of non-fiction • Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana • Educated at Cornell University, but dropped out in 1943 and enlisted in the army • Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge • Interned in Dresden and survived the bombing by taking refuge in the meat locker of a slaughterhouse • Came home, married his high school sweetheart, had three children, and began a prolific career of writing and teaching • Morbidly comical commentator on the culture & society in which he lived

POSTMODERNISM: NOT JUST LITERATURE • Can be applied to art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural & literary criticism (among others) • Largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific (or objective) society • HIGHLY dependent on personal reality

SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE • Published in 1969 • The result of Vonnegut’s 23 year struggle to capture his experience as an American POW in WWII • Combines science fiction, autobiography, historical fiction, and modern satire • Depicts the life of Billy Pilgrim, who, like Vonnegut, experiences the bombing of Dresden as the defining moment of his life

WHILE YOU LISTEN… • Illustrate what comes to mind. This should look like doodling, no need to be super concrete. Just go with what pops into your mind. • What strikes you about Vonnegut’s style? • What questions does the narrator leave you with? • How does personal experience seem to factor into this writing?

WHAT IS POSTMODERN LIT?

POSTMODERN LITERATURE • A form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as: • Fragmentation • Paradox • Unreliable narrators • Unrealistic and impossible plots • Parody • Paranoia • Dark humor • Authorial self reference

POSTMODERN AUTHORS • Reject outright meaning in their novels, stories and poems • Highlight and celebrate the possibility of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work • Reject many of the ideas that came with Modernism • Serve to: Dispute, Reverse, Mock, Reject • Instead of following the Modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, Postmodernist literature shuns, often playfully, the very possibility of meaning • Postmodern novels, stories, or poems are often presented as parody of the Modernist quest for meaning

POSTMODERN PHILOSOPHY • Reaction to stylistic and ideological limitations of Modernist literature and the radical changes the world underwent after the end of WWII • Modernist writers depicted the world as: fragmented, troubled, and on the edge of disaster…so they search for meaning • Postmodern writers, having already undergone countless disasters and being beyond redemption and understanding, along with the awareness of the possibility of utter disaster and apocalypse on the horizon, feel that locating precise meanings and reasons behind any event is impossible • Conceptualize the world as being impossible to strictly define and understand • Challenges binaries: good vs. evil, darkness vs. light, etc. There are no absolutes

VONNEGUT’S WORLDVIEW ‘Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind. ’ What does this quotation mean to you? If you could rewrite the last sentence, what would it be? What rule would you give to future generations?

POSTMODERNISM & YOU Postmodernism requires you to know what you believe about the world in order to fully engage with texts. Using the rewritten Vonnegut quote as your starting point, you are going to create a postmodern representation of your worldview. Your white sheet of paper must include: -a ½ page explanation of your worldview -a visual representation of something in your write up -an attempt to mimic the elements of postmodernism

HOMEWORK • Read Vonnegut’s “EPICAC” • Come prepared tomorrow to discuss • We miiiight have a reading quiz