![]() ![]() ![]() This demonstrates how jazz poetry is an intertextual genre, entailing writing and reciting words that evoke the sounds, pacing and lyrics of music.Once, while in the midst of the (I believed then) obligatory baking of Christmas cookies, my friend Chris Torke called. Jazz poems inspired by the blues do not simply transcribe blues lyrics instead, they ingeniously transform standard twelve-bar and eight=bar blues forms with strategically placed disruptions of the steady flow of standard meter, that recall the sudden stops and starts in improvised jazz. These enact a delicate balance between describing the social conditions of performing the blues and transliterating authentic blues lyrics. It also employs Henry Louis Gates' theoretical concept of "Signifyin(g)"- "black double-voicedness because it always entails formal revision and intertextual relation" (The Signifying Monkey 51)- to analyze two blues poems, "The Weary Blues: (1923) by Langston Hughes and "Ma Rainey" (1932) by Sterling Brown. 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.īeginning with the question "what constitutes jazz poetry?", this paper elucidates the musico-historical link between blues and jazz genres. 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. 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. 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. ![]() These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. In conclusion, I wish to present how Slaughterhouse Five allows a positive paradigm shift in historiography with the historical, literary, and philosophical ideas Kurt Vonnegut presents through postmodern literature. ![]() I will discuss Vonnegut’s philosophy of time and how a non-linear view of time plays an important role in the representation of history in present, past and future events. Vonnegut’s usage and display of time is interwoven with the characteristics of historiographic metafiction. I will discuss how this is used, and to what benefits this form of historiography can adhere to the limitations of writing first-person experiences and events within a war. After which, I will discuss Vonnegut’s genre of historiography, that being historiographic metafiction. Primarily, I will focus on why and how it occurred, as well as why it was kept out of the media for so long. This paper is a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut's work of literary fiction entitled Slaughterhouse Five, primarily it's contribution of the genre 'historiographic metafiction' to postmodern historiography, The question I will address is ‘How does Vonnegut contribute to the postmodern historical literature through the usage of historiographic metafiction?’ I will address the question by, firstly, giving a summarized description of the bombing of Dresden, the history of the event, and the historiography behind it. Published in Writers Online Volume 5, Number 2 (Spring 2001). SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE was the right novel at the right time, just as anti-Vietnam War protests were cresting in the wake of the political chaos of 1968 and alternative approaches to consciousness, experience, memory and expression in art and literature were finding mainstream appreciation among a reading public whose demography, tastes and attitudes toward authority and tradition were radically shifting. These readings are not mutually exclusive in fact, their simultaneous viability reinforces the virtuosic totality of a work that transcends the limits of both genres. The novel's plausible depictions of trauma-induced psychosis and post-traumatic stress allow it to be read both as absurdist space (and time) opera and as a narrative of psychological realism. Literary Journalism/Reference: Retrospective treatment of Vonnegut's most celebrated work as a genre-mixing work of war fiction and science fiction escapism. ![]()
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