Acknowledgements Preface 1. A Postmodern Iconography 2. Misanthropic Humanism: Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan 3. Anxiety and the Jargon of Authenticity: Mother Night 4. Dialectic of American Enlightenment: Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater 5. Eternal Returns, or Tralfamadorian Ethics: Slaughterhouse-Five 6. Anti-Oedipus of the Heartland: Breakfast of Champions 7. Imaginary Communities, or the Ends of the Political: Slapstick and Jailbird 8. Abstract Idealism: Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard 9. Apocalypse in the Optative Mood: Galápagos 10. Twilight of the Icons: Hocus Pocus and Timequake Bibliography Index
A study of Kurt Vonnegut's novels, approaching them as literary experiments attempting to comprehend the American experience in the postmodern condition.
Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA, where he teaches American and world literature.
Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel does much to reposition
Vonnegut as a major American writer. By approaching Vonnegut’s
oeuvre as an integrated postmodern iconography, a strategic project
bridging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, Tally reveals
Vonnegut to be a serious, deeply imaginative writer whose fictions
intervene in major intellectual debates—political and
theoretical—that continue to impact contemporary social
developments.
*Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and
Culture*
‘Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel is an exciting re-evaluation
of this much overlooked author's work. Tally deftly rereads
Vonnegut's novels, situating them in an American tradition of
fiction that seeks to make sense of the larger American experience.
The book skilfully interweaves a germane selection of literary and
critical theory to convincingly argue that Vonnegut should be
reassessed as a substantial Modernist rather than Postmodernist
writer.'
*David Simmons, Lecturer in American Literature, Film and
Television Studies, Northampton University, UK*
Robert Tally's book makes a serious scholarly contribution not only
to Vonnegut studies, but to the field of contemporary American
literature in general. Arguing persuasively that Vonnegut is a
"reluctant postmodernist," a "misanthropic humanist" with modernist
longings, Tally situates his readings of Vonnegut's fourteen novels
amid recent critical debates about American literature, about
postmodernism, and about what it means to be a human being. The
book is that rarest of academic works, at once critically
well-informed and eminently readable.
*Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston, USA*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |