The Wit and Wisdom of Kurt Vonnegut, 2021, Teaching Vonnegut

Education and the Arts at the Center of Kurt Vonnegut's Universe., 2023

The Theme of the 2023 Teaching Vonnegut series is that High School is at the Core of the American Experience. As we will see, the Vonnegut family, from his great-grandfather right down to Kurt Jr., were all musically literate. And Kurt Vonnegut’s influence continues to grow. Vonnegut’s reflections about the dynamic of being broadly educated, and that as an artist, reflects the depth of his family’s concerns as well as his regional influences and worldly experiences. Vonnegut extols the value of art, and he encourages graduates to engage with literature, music, and other art forms since they have the power to expand our perspectives, foster empathy, and inspire creativity. Art is a vital tool for making sense of the human experience. The 14 July 2023, KVML presentation, can be viewed at: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fjgz5j1sap58hiem9mmyi/h?rlkey=44rxtzkv9pyrsubotu2q9o61o&dl=0

The Journal of Undergraduate Research, 2018

Part of the American Literature Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Humane Education Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons, Liberal Studies Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, Political History Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Secondary Education Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social History Commons, Social Work Commons, and the United States History Commons

2003

Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. In spite of the critical insistence on Vonnegut’s existential or deterministic philosophy, little work has been done to develop either of these ideas, and strictly through critical repetition, Vonnegut’s work has become more closely associated with French existentialism than with the determinism of American literary naturalism. By overstating the influence of existentialism on Vonnegut’s novels, critics have neglected the influence of determinism on his work, and this neglect disconnects the author from his American literature roots of naturalism. Through an examination of Vonnegut’s treatment of free will and determinism in three of his signature texts, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this study reveals a tension between the two philosophies in the author’s work. Instead of being predominantly existential, Vonnegut’s works leave unresolved a tension between existentialism, where people create their own meaning through acts of free will, and determinism, where people have no free will and react to the physical environments in which they have been placed.

2017

Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle has received great scholarship, yet the representation of music in the novel has often been missed. For the most part, academics have focused their research on the literary intertextuality. Conversely, I will study the music intertextuality and point out the fact that Vonnegut's milestone novel is undoubtedly indebted to the ballad tradition. In order to proof this thesis statement, I will focus the bulk of my paper on examining the treatment given to music in Cat's Cradle. Three main lines of study will deal with this question. The first one focuses on the leitmotifs Vonnegut used to write such a social satire, namely, love, death and destruction. By providing reliable secondary sources, the paper will show that those topics are also the main driving forces in the ballad texts. Secondly, the representation of music will be analyzed by dividing its study into two approaches, music in the text and music off the text. The former deals with the actual lyrics found in the novel as well as the Calypso music characterizing them. Music off the text, though, focuses on the narrative, both on its structure and its content. Thus, the way chapters are used in the novel, for instance, as well as its style, give a particular cadence to the text, a musicality that resembles that of the oral literary tradition. Moreover, the plot displays music through different channels, characters linked to instruments, or scenes with background music. Therefore, in-text instances of those features will be presented to show that the representation of music plays a key role in Cat's Cradle since it turns the novel into a dramatic and lyrical groundbreaking piece.

The b2o Review, 2016

My review of Robert Tally's 2011 book *Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography*, originally published in *The b2o Review*, which is part of the *boundary 2* editorial collective's online community. The original publication can be accessed at the following link: https://www.boundary2.org/2016/01/misanthropic-humanism-the-politics-of-comic-futility-robert-t-tally-jr-s-kurt-vonnegut-and-the-american-novel/.

Once the contemporaneity of the 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five by American writer Kurt Vonnegut is established, the text outlines the narrative strategies, the stylistic preferences and the peculiar techniques of wording that, together, build up the author’s distinctive individual style nowadays so frequently associated to him. The study also highlights his incomparable sense of humor, his sagacity and satiric wit, as the foremost elements of creation that provide unique hue to his stories. Finally, metatextual instances are selected for investigation as well as his atypical fictional technique referred here as space-temporal dislocation.

Forthcoming in "Specters of the Author" (Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press, 2014.)

The chief aim of this paper is not to find and provide answers but to discover and try new ways and forms of questioning. Theories of authorship, and indeed, theories of everything and anything, cannot properly be formulated by way of assertions, by way of the plain indicative, of the evidential. Is the interrogative the only proper mood of theorizing? It seems so. David J. Gunkel writes that the most important task of philosophy (and, if I may add, theory) is to develop a mode of questioning that recognizes that all questions, no matter how well formulated and carefully deployed, make exclusive decisions about what is to be included and what gets left out of consideration. The best we can do, what we have to and should do, is continually submit questioning to questioning, asking not only what is given privileged status by a particular question and what necessarily remains excluded but also how a particular mode of inquiry already makes, and cannot avoid making, such decisions; what assumptions and underlying values this decision patronizes; and what consequences-ontological, epistemological, and moral-follow from it. (2012a, 13-4) This is quite similar to what Slavoj Žižek has in mind when writing about "false questions:"

Resources for American Literary Study, 2011

Selçuk Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi, 2024

Bu makale, modern endüstri toplumlarında yaşantı sahalarını birbirinden keskince ayırarak nihayetinde insan unsurunu tamamen oyun dışına iten aşırı mekanikleşme olgusunu soruşturmaktadır. Özellikle Herbert Marcuse ve Jürgen Habermas odakta olmak üzere Frankfurt Okulu filozofları, geç kapitalizmin egemen olduğu toplumlarda teknolojiye içkin ideolojik işlevleri titizce irdelemişlerdir. Buna benzer biçimde, Otomatik Piyano adlı romanında Kurt Vonnegut da kurumsal kapitalizm egemenliği altında aşırı derecede teknolojikleşmiş ve otomatikleşmiş bir toplum imgesini yansıtabilmek amacıyla yakın geleceğe ait bir Amerika kurgulamaktadır. Bu çalışma Vonnegut’un roman dünyasında baskın olan teknokratik devletin teknolojiden faydalanarak insan kitlelerini nasıl etkisiz ve işlevsiz kıldığını incelemekte, bu sayede teknolojinin yalnızca değerden bağımsız bir pratik beceriler toplamı olduğu görüşüne karşı bir itiraz ortaya koymaktadır. Vonnegut’un anti-ütopyacı anlatısında betimlendiği üzere değer yitimine uğramış insan öznesi ve insansızlaşmış toplumsal dizge, Marcuse’nin ‘tek boyutlu toplum’ nosyonuna ve Habermas’ın ‘iletişimsel eylem’ kuramına göndermeler eşliğinde ele alınacak, böylece teknolojik aklın yaşam-dünyası üzerindeki yoksullaştırma ve sömürgeleştirme etkisinin çözümlenebilmesi için gerekli eleştirel çerçeve sağlanacaktır.