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Showing 1 to 18 of 18 for “"Kurt Vonnegut"”.
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Carnivalesque Inversion: The Subversive Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut
This thesis considers the novels of Kurt Vonnegut, focusing on Cat’s Cradle (1963), Player Piano (1952), and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), through the literary theories of Mikhail Bakhtin. It concentrates on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque inversion from Rabelais and his World (1965), his theoretical …
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The Concept of Dignity in the Early Science Fiction Novels of Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut's early science fiction novels depict societies and characters that, as in the real world, have become callous and downtrodden. These works use supercomputers, aliens, and space travel, often in a comical manner, to demonstrate that the future, unless people change their concepts of …
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The Inspiration to Activism: Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut as Hopeful Critics of Humanity
"The Inspiration to Activism: Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut as Hopeful Critics of Humanity," posits that although both authors have been considered pessimists and even fatalists, a study of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and Slaughterhouse-Five supports that they do maintain hope for improvement. …
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A Moral Being in an Aesthetic World: Being in the Early Novels of Kurt Vonnegut
… paper I will address notions of being in four of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels using Martin Heidegger’s aesthetic phenomenology. The four novels that this paper will address are Player Piano, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions. Player Piano and Sirens of Titan are Vonnegut’s …
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A self-conscious Kurt Vonnegut: an analysis of Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions
The works of Kurt Vonnegut stand as seminal in the American literary canon. Looking at three of his most influential novels, namely Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, this study aims to better understand the mechanisms which inform his fiction. Working chronologically …
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Violence & Volition: Choice, Acceptance, and Identity in Selected Works by Flannery O'Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, and Cormac McCarthy
… directly affect the results of that violence. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, through the character of Billy Pilgrim, extends choices around violence even further, suggesting that inaction is sometimes the best plan. Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men highlights how a combination of …
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Empty heroics, low comedy and pointless death: Structures of melancholy in the early novels of Kurt Vonnegut
… explores structures of melancholy in five of Kurt Vonnegut's early novels, Player Piano, The Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. The thesis attempts to give new readings to each of the novels by drawing on critical approaches to melancholy and by …
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The Words. Or Holes. Or Both: Writing as an Integrative Methodology for Trauma
… and specific authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Kurt Vonnegut to explore the way writers describe the trauma of combat. Using insights from neuroscience and psychology, I will expand the field of Cognitive Literary Studies from a focus on the reader to a focus on the writer by linking …
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Seeing Whiteness: the Progression and Regression of White Identity in Four Post-Civil War Literary Generations
… the work of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and contemporary writers George Saunders, J.D. Vance, and Jonathan Franzen. It seeks to understand patterns in racism, white nationalism, and white supremacy as part of the fundamental construct of the literary white man, and follows …
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Safe Space: A novel and accompanying critical study into the participatory culture in fandom and a historiographic approach to the fragmentation of popular culture in select novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon.
… fiction text.<br/><br/>Through case studies of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon, the dissertation examines how historiographic metafiction can illuminate the cyclical nature of cultural conflicts. By analysing the thematic and narrative techniques of these authors, the study demonstrates how …
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The Dilemma of Existence in the Nuclear Age: Four Views
… by William Styron; The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; and The Martyred, by Richard Kim. Findings. The novels approach the problem from various positions: theism, existentialism, black humor, and humanism. They deal with six common themes: war, God, human relationships, love, truth, …
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Literature of utopia and dystopia. Technological influences shaping the form and content of utopian visions.
… the work of William Morris, Aldous Huxley and Kurt Vonnegut rejected science in preference for a different social order. More's Utopia and Bacon's New Atlantis were written at a time when feudal, agricultural society was being transformed by new discoveries and techniques. In a later age, …
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Kurt Vonnegut's Early Novels: Searching for Meaning in a Meaningless World
<p>This thesis investigates three novels by Kurt Vonnegut: <em>The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle</em>, and <em>God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater</em>, and the philosophical stance which informs these works.<em> The Sirens of Titan</em> represents Vonnegut’s cosmology as well as his first attempts to …
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Interrogating History or Making History? Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, DeLillo's Libra, and the Shaping of Collective Memory
… in particular: <em>Slaughterhouse-Five</em> by Kurt Vonnegut and <em>Libra</em> by Don DeLillo. I use my examination of these two novels as a means of analyzing the relationship between fiction and the epistemology of history. In my analysis, I point out the tendency of much postmodern fiction …
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Conducting L'Histoire du Soldat : a tale of two libretti
… Ramuz, the Russian Stravinsky, and the American Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “Grand Choral,” the penultimate movement of Stravinsky’s l’Histoire du Soldat—written in 1918—provides a key to unlocking the mysteries of construction, ideology, and by extension, performance of the work. “Grand Choral” parodies …
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Social paranoia and absurdist fiction in Cold War America and Soviet Russia: a comparative study
… authors Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut. Focusing on key works by each author, this research considers these texts as products of two culturally diverse, yet equally paranoid societies and explores their preoccupation with issues of spying, infiltration and conspiracy. This …
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ΠΑΙΧΝΙΔΙΑ ΜΕΤΑΦΗΓΗΜΑΤΙΚΗΣ ΜΥΘΟΠΛΑΣΙΑΣ: ΤΟ ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΟ ΤΟΥ ΠΑΙΧΝΙΔΙΟΥ ΣΤΟΝ ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟ ΚΑΙ ΤΟ ΜΥΘΙΣΤΟΡΗΜΑ
THIS STUDY IS A COMPARATIVE EXAMINATION OF NOVELS AND FILMS AS TWO DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGICAL MEDIA AND AS TWO ART FORMS OF NARRATIVE FICTION. THE COMMUNICATIVE ASPECT OF THESE ART FORMS IS STRESSED IN ORDER TO FACILITATE AN EXAMINATION OF THE NARRATIVE SITUATION IN ITS ENTIRETY AND IN ORDER TO …