Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut.

1990 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 149
Author(s):  
Tom Samet ◽  
Lawrence R. Broer
Keyword(s):  
Kurt Vonnegut

The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Haacke
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Le Corbusier ◽  
The Body ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Cinematic Space

From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of “high” and “low.”

LA VISIÓN Y LA VOZ COMO EJES PROBLEMÁTICOS EN LA REPRESENTACIÓN LITERARIA A PARTIR DEL SIGLO XX

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (01) ◽  
pp. 167-175
Author(s):  
Jorge Aloy
Keyword(s):  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Siglo Xx

Las guerras mundiales, además de haber provocado destrucciones humanas y materiales, pusieron en entredicho a la representación artística. En el presente trabajo, vamos a pensar la representación preguntándonos cómo se produce el traslado de la visión hacia la puesta en voz en la obra literaria. Para ello, revisaremos las problemáticas que entrañan la vista, cuando el que ve es el propio escritor; y la voz, cuando debe dar cuenta de lo visto. En este sentido, enmarcaremos como modelo a la novela Matadero cinco de Kurt Vonnegut, cuyo eje argumental está cimentado en las vivencias traumáticas de la Masacre de Dresde.  

Kurt Vonnegut

2015 ◽  
pp. 170-173
Author(s):  
Uwe Böker ◽  
Frank Kelleter
Keyword(s):  
Kurt Vonnegut

Difficulties at the Metalevel

Runaway ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Chaney
Keyword(s):  
Family Relations ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Double Bind ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Atom Bomb ◽  
Logical Paradox ◽  
Administration Hospital ◽  
Catch 22 ◽  
Lewis Mumford ◽  
The Stranger

The narrative setting for chapter 2 is the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, in the 1950s, where Bateson lead the double-bind research group investigating paradox and disorder in family relations. The chapter traces the early development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and its source in Russellian logical paradox. It discusses the double bind as a resonant and empirically rich example of similar constructs that distilled the modern predicament as an impossible dilemma. Other examples include Joseph Heller's catch-22, Reinhold Niebuhr's reformulation of original sin and his Serenity Prayer; Albert Camus's concept of the absurd and his novel The Stranger; and constructions in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five. Double-bind equivalents as reactions to the atom bomb are described in works such as Joanna Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and the film Rebel Without a Cause. Meanwhile, social critics such as Lewis Mumford used psychiatric and systems theory language and paradoxical constructions to talk about the failure of "pragmatic liberalism," the arms race, and policies of nuclear deterrence.

Paratext as weapon

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 354-379
Author(s):  
Ilaria Sicari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Italo Calvino ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
State Control ◽  
Soviet System ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Foreign Literature ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract Although the selection and publication of foreign literature in the USSR was subject to state control, many foreign works were able to reach the Soviet reader, thanks to the clever strategies employed by editors, literary advisers, critics, and translators. This was particularly true in the case of foreign literature written by Western authors, which underwent more rigorous control and often required incisive cultural and ideological domestication in order to comply with the aesthetics of the Soviet literary canon. Through the analysis of a corpus of published and unpublished Soviet critical texts, this article sheds new light on the Soviet system of cultural production by taking into account the strategies implemented, at different levels, by cultural operators, and in particular by critics. This article focuses on the Soviet reception of Western anti-mimetic novels by Italo Calvino and Kurt Vonnegut, illustrating the strategies of critical domestication to which they were subjected.

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