TOTALITARISMO, IGUALDADE E ORDEM NATURAL: REFLEXÕES LITERÁRIAS, ÉTICAS E JURÍDICAS A PARTIR DA DISTOPIA ‘HARRISON BERGERON’, DE KURT VONNEGUT JR.

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered

Reviewed by: Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography by Robert T. Tally Jr. Rachel McCoppin Tally Jr., Robert T. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography. London: Continuum, 2011. 185 pp. $81.00. How does one place Kurt Vonnegut in the American literary canon? Is he an acclaimed postmodern revolutionary author or a marginal science-fiction dark humorist? Robert T. Tally Jr. addresses this question that continues to arise in considerations of Vonnegut’s works. Tally contends that scholars are not sure where to place Vonnegut’s literary achievements; some, like Jerome Klinkowitz and Todd Davis, place him firmly within Postmodernism, while others have trouble taking his work seriously and continue to label him as marginal. Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography asserts that Vonnegut is neither a postmodern author nor a marginal one; instead, Tally argues that Vonnegut is a modern author tackling postmodern issues, in search of creating the “great American novel.” Tally contends, though, that Vonnegut fails at achieving this elusive goal. His works portray [End Page 315] postmodern American culture and its concepts of idealism, political, economic, and social superiority, and personal identity and responsibility. Yet they purposefully fail to capture the totality of American culture in its present moment because, as Tally argues, Vonnegut serves the role of iconographer and iconoclast; he is a critic of postmodern America, never achieving the “great American novel” because he places postmodern America within a modern context. Vonnegut’s iconoclasm allows his works to hold critical literary merit, not because they capture postmodern American culture, but because in their portrayal and criticism of it, they help readers better understand themselves. Tally analyzes Vonnegut’s fourteen novels to show Vonnegut as an untimely modernist in a postmodern America. He proceeds in chronological order of publication, stating that Vonnegut’s first novels, Player Piano and Sirens of Titan, are among his most frustrated and pessimistic. Tally discusses Vonnegut’s embrace of “misanthropic humanism” as a dominant theme in all of his works. In these initial novels, Vonnegut points out postmodern America as politically, socially, and psychologically flawed. Vonnegut’s “misanthropic humanism” reveals that these problems will not go away because they are intrinsically tied to human nature. Though Vonnegut presents his America in postmodern terms, his message is modern: “Vonnegut’s misanthropic humanism offers a model for understanding this [postmodern] condition, while also forcing the writer and the reader to look for other avenues leading to one’s sense of purpose in the world” (xvi). Tally moves to an exploration of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, which, he states, addresses the impossibility of living a modern “authentic” life in postmodern America. According to Tally, Mother Night questions the purpose of human existence; it calls for evaluation of self in a fractured and meaningless world, and its message continues into Vonnegut’s next novels, Cat’s Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. In these novels, Tally finds a more secured stance of optimism through personal ethical responsibility, which ultimately becomes part of all of Vonnegut’s works and is achieved only through personal separation and examination of one’s place in the world. Tally continues with a discussion of Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, asserting that though these novels perhaps appear the most postmodern in format and content, they again reveal a modern message of morality. Both novels embrace the fated nihilistic components of postmodern culture, while at the same time maintaining a modern love of the ridiculousness of postmodernism and a belief in the good qualities of humankind that continue even among absurdity. Vonnegut’s Slapstick and Jailbird continue to show elements from his earlier novels, but focus largely on the human desire for false security within corrupt communities. Both novels look towards the social and political failures of postmodern America in order to ask readers to abandon hope through institutions. Vonnegut’s Deadeye Dick and Bluebeard are, according to Tally, imperative to Vonnegut’s repertoire because they detail an alternative to the postmodern condition: these novels reveal Vonnegut’s means towards maintaining a modern sense of meaning in his own life and provide characters that persevere—through the “abstract idealism” (114...

Reviewed by: Kurt Vonnegut's America Robert Morace Klinkowitz, Jerome . Kurt Vonnegut's America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. x + 142 pp. $34.95. Cloth. Although written by a leading critic and published by a university press, Kurt Vonnegut's America is not really an academic book. It is, however, the one book that anyone coming to Vonnegut for the first time or wanting to reacquaint her- or himself with Vonnegut should read to learn about the work and the man. A cross between a short study and a long obituary, Kurt Vonnegut's America is written in the conversational style that Jerome Klinkowitz used in interviews for The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, [End Page 120] To the Point, and other news shows following Vonnegut's death in 2007 and is intended to be summary rather than seminal in the way that Klinkowitz's groundbreaking 1975 book, Literary Disruptions, devoted to Vonnegut and other "post-contemporary" American fiction writers was. Made up almost entirely of decade-by-decade, book-by-book discussions of Vonnegut and his work, this compact but comprehensive volume offers a Cook's tour with an immensely knowledgeable guide who tells us what Vonnegut did; how and why he did it; and to what effect on author, reader, and nation alike. If the judgments made and the lessons drawn seem at times a little too pat, the reason is not intellectual laziness but Klinkowitz's way of paying homage to Vonnegut by borrowing some of his techniques and taking some of the same risks, including being willing to sound less sophisticated than he is. Although the overall structure is linear, much of Kurt Vonnegut's America is as collage-like as Vonnegut's own work, combining criticism, homage, obituary, and personal reminiscence into a brief but compelling portrait of a distinctly American artist. In it, we see, for example, how the humor Vonnegut used as the youngest child to get his family's attention became a major element of his literary style as he grappled with larger personal, national, and global issues. Klinkowitz also discusses how the Depression that changed his family's fortunes and destroyed his mother's mind also resulted in Vonnegut's attending public schools where the friendships he formed with working-class children helped form the egalitarian viewpoint that characterizes his fiction and his vision of America and its failings. Dresden and Slaughterhouse-Five have so dominated our thinking about Vonnegut that we often forget how the later work derives, rather than departs, from the '50s fiction that "spoke the language, fed the interests, and answered the concerns of people like himself" (19). As Klinkowitz explains, "As Americans adjusted to the new postwar realities—new politics, new economics, new demographics, even new art and music...short stories and novels, especially in a commonly accessible form, helped people get settled: hence Vonnegut's work in Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, and in a book-club selection such as Player Piano and a paperback original (rack size for drugstores and bus stations) such as The Sirens of Titan" (33). Within that context and that of his "core values" (which Klinkowitz shares), Vonnegut adapted to the changing times and to his changing role as an American writer. When Collier's accepted his early stories, Vonnegut resigned from General Electric to become a full-time author, but when the advertising revenues that supported magazines such as Collier's shifted to television and outlets for stories such as "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" dried up, Vonnegut explored "new markets with new literary forms" (52), turning out thirty-four pieces of nonfiction between 1964 and 1970 to keep the pot boiling for his growing family. Vonnegut not only adopted some of the techniques of the New Journalism then coming into vogue, he also quickly adapted them to his fiction-writing, as is evident in Slaughterhouse-Five, which, according to Klinkowitz, "established its author as a celebrity spokesperson for key issues of the day" (62) and as a result created opportunities as well as problems for Vonnegut. As a "celebrity spokesperson" Vonnegut took his civic responsibility seriously, even as his first marriage was falling apart...

A Sucker’s Punch Jermome Klinkowitz (bio) Sucker’s Portfolio Kurt Vonnegut Amazon Publishing www.apub.com 178 Pages; Print, $7.99 Sucker’s Portfolio is the print version of Kurt Vonnegut’s fifth volume of posthumously published fiction. First serialized in a Kindle edition in the last two months of 2012, it gathers six previously unpublished short stories written in the 1950s but rejected by the weekly family magazines that had been this author’s venue before gaining fame as a novelist in the 1960s. Also included is an uncompleted story with a futuristic setting, the type of work Vonnegut’s agents usually had to place in the less remunerative pulp market. Adding bulk to the volume, and also illustrating the more adept author Kurt Vonnegut would become, is his unpublished essay from 1992, The Last Talisman. Of the posthumous collections published so far, Sucker’s Portfolio presents the most typical examples of what he was doing in the 1950s—which is to say examples of what he had to change in his repertory of effects to succeed in subsequent decades. At its best, Vonnegut’s fifties fiction takes the structure by which a culture professes to understand itself—such as unwarranted riches being a curse rather than a blessing, or undue cleverness turning back on its practitioner—and twists them in a special way that brings forth an unexpected truth. At its worst, it panders to those structures without asking the questions about presumed beliefs that would characterize such mature work as Cat’s Cradle (1963) and Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). The finest of this writer’s fifties work was reprinted in 1968 as Welcome to the Monkey House (1968), while the worst—rejected by the magazines, or his agents, or in some cases never circulated himself—waited until after Vonnegut’s death to be published. Sucker’s Portfolio is the best of the worst. Earlier volumes in the Vonnegut Estate’s posthumous publication program gathered stories pertinent respectively to war or social manners. This latest collection chooses pieces treating relationships between men and women—husbands and wives, lovers, and brothers and sisters—with an emphasis on how the women remain inscrutable. For a writer gifted with insights into a woman’s character, this subject could have been a gold mine. But even at the peak of his success, Vonnegut would admit that he was better with language and incident than character, and a total failure when it came to realizing women on the page. Once he’d found his voice with a vernacular control of language and incident, character would take care of itself, both female and male. Without that voice, weak characterization stands out like the stereotypification it is. And Sucker’s Portfolio is rife with stereotypes. Do you want a woman to assert herself? The simple, old-fashioned way is to make her a tough type, hard as nails and with a male name such as Marty or Jackie. That happens here in “Rome” and “Sucker’s Punch,” where one woman is a hash-house waitress (with a broken nose), the other a hat-check girl (who works a prostitution scam with her boyfriend). Is there an alternative? In “Rome” it’s an innocent young thing named Melody portrayed as an airhead, while in “Miss Snow, You’re Fired” the woman is an object of beauty, no more and no less, and is fired because her boss cannot perceive anything else. Some narrative dynamics exist in Paris, France, where three couples at distinct stages of life ponder their relationships. The middle-aged pair even generate some comic insight on the author’s part, to the effect that their otherwise jaded co-existence is made easier when there’s money to spend or couples much older than themselves for invidious comparison. But only rarely do incidents in Sucker’s Portfolio support such comic stretches. Too often points made rest on entirely typical evidence. At his best, Kurt Vonnegut could seize the typical and use it for something entirely new. The volume’s first story, “Between Timid and Timbuktu,” has enough affinities with material in the Vonnegut canon to make it a significant piece of early work. The...

The Book of Job, with its unanswered questions, its textual complexities and its interpretive ambiguities, is particularly suited to being read and reread from different perspectives and with different lenses. In this chapter, the author engages in the activity of rereading to which the book so deliberately lays itself open. Choosing the theme of the making and unmaking of the world, which appears in Job in the dispute over what the world ought to be like, in which all the major characters participate, the chapter brings the book into contact with other discourse in which this theme appears. It opens up a kind of space for thinking in, to see what happens, what new interpretive possibilities grow out of this cross-pollination. If these conversation partners, Elaine Scarry, Kurt Vonnegut, and Don LaFontaine are unlikely bedfellows, drawn from both 'higher' and 'lower' cultural contexts, so much livelier will the discussion be. Keywords: Book of Job; Don LaFontaine; Elaine Scarry; Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most known figures of the late 20th century and beginnings of the 21st century. He is one of the most prolific writers of American literature of those days. His novels are known for a usage of a wide range of subjects, starting with science and ending with environmental issues, like that of global warming.But, different from some of his well-known contemporaries, Kurt Vonnegut started writing science-fiction in paperback in order to make ends meet, as he was in a very difficult economical situation. Influenced by writers as Aldous Huxley, with “Brave New World” and also by the studies of chemistry he attended when he was at university, he used in his novels machines, super-computers, aliens, lives in other planets, etc. However, he was not just a science-fiction writer. Instead, science-fiction became a means for him to better express the ideas he had about the world. He creates other5 planets to show us what goes wrong in ours, he writes about machines that have substituted the man, he writes about scientists that are not responsible at all about the effects of their inventions. The world is not saved by scientists, but it ends because of them. That is the aim of this presentation: to show how science becomes an art in Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p722

This study discusses Kurt Vonnegut's view of war reflected in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five and also his efforts in conveying his views through his novel. This novel is based on the experience of Kurt Vonnegut during World War II when he was imprisoned in a German city called Dresden and witnessed the destruction of the city on February 13, 1945 in an Allied bombing operation. In the novel, Vonnegut rewrote his experience in the form of a fiction. In discussing this literary work, I used the expressive theory by M. H. Abrams which was supported by a historical and biographical approach. In analyzing this literary work, I took quotes from the novel Slaughterhouse-Five as the main data as well as other data as secondary data, such as the biography of the author, interviews with the author taken from various sources, as well as writings on author that is relevant to the discussion in this study. The result show that Kurt Vonnegut see war as something that was completely meaningless and only caused destruction and death for innocent residents. Kurt Vonnegut uses narrative techniques such as black humor, irony, and metaphysics at Slaughterhouse-Five so that his views on war can be conveyed to his readers.

Neither history, nor logic, nor research will prevent unfair payment- by-results systems from being designed and implemented, Mr. Nelson says. And whenever such schemes are implemented, the most tragic victim of the timequake is authentic and meaningful improvement. The premise of Timequake One was that a timequake, a sudden glitch in the space-time continuum, made everyone and everything do exactly what they'd done during a past decade, for good or ill, a second time. It was deja vu that wouldn't quit for 10 long years. You couldn't complain about life being nothing but old stuff, or ask if just you were going nuts or if everybody was going nuts. There was absolutely nothing you could say during the rerun, if you hadn't said it the first time through the decade. You couldn't even save your own life or that of a loved one, if you failed to do that the first time through. . . . when people got back to when the timequake hit did they stop being robots of their pasts. As the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout said, Only when free will kicked in again could they stop running obstacle courses of their own construction. - Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake LIKE the world in Kurt Vonnegut's prescient 1997 novel, the world of education in the late 20th century seems to have been struck by a timequake in which we are all destined to repeat our lives on automatic pilot until the timequake is over and free will returns. The manifestation of this timequake is now evident to anyone who is paying attention to the many accountability initiatives around the country, including recent news from Denver, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, where schemes for for teachers have been announced. But the less recent news tells us that the innovations of performance-based and related merit pay schemes (which may collectively be labeled by results) have a history dating back well over a century. The idea of tying monetary support to demonstrated results - an idea that should have expired long ago - lingers like a dormant fault line. With school districts in three major cities trying new payment-by-results schemes (with the cooperation of teacher unions), more educators than ever before may soon experience the destructive force of this frighteningly recurrent phenomenon. If you haven't heard the news yet, in September 1999 teachers in Minneapolis agreed to a contract that included a new pay formula. For the first time, the formula went beyond differentiated pay based on education and experience to include other measures. Though details are yet to be fully worked out, peer review, which began as a voluntary improvement initiative a decade ago and was made mandatory in 1997, will probably be one of the ways teachers' pay is differentiated.1 The Minneapolis teachers' contract comes close on the heels of similar news from Denver, where earlier in September 1999 the teacher union and the school board announced a two-year pilot program that will directly link teachers' salaries with student performance. In the Denver pilot program, about 15% of Denver's 4,300 teachers are to be involved in the new payment-by-results scheme.2 Most recently, word has come that performance pay is part of the new collective bargaining agreement with Philadelphia teachers. But what really is news here? After all, the idea of payment by results has a history in education that includes numerous schemes and dates back well over a hundred years. Perhaps the most dramatic new development with regard to payment by results is the response of some teachers and union representatives to this recycled reform. This response ranges from resignation and acquiescence to what sounds like approval. The president of the National Education Association was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune as saying, I applaud these places for trying new approaches. They are to be commended for taking some risks and looking at things in a different way and doing things that are innovative. …

Remembering Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut 1922-2007 "All this happened, more or less," writes Vonnegut in the opening line of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut taught—more or less—a generation how to rewrite and reread American culture. How to get outside of it and laugh and cry and scream about it. He delivered biting satire through unpretentious, innovative narrative with irreverence, brilliance, and humor. To simutaneously bellylaugh and think deeply about American society, culture, and history was his particular form of genius. I met him for the first time in the mid-eighties. He was a literary rock star at the time. He and I sat down for a beer at the college pub. I wanted to ask him so many things, but wound up compressing them into one question: "Where's it all headed, Mr. Vonnegut?" He replied, "The world's on the brink of a nuclear war and the only thing preventing it from happening is an alcoholic president staring down his last beer in an otherwise empty refrigerator." Wittgenstein couldn't have answered my question more deeply, but I also lost some of my beer from laughing so hard. I raise a last glass to Mr. Vonnegut. —Jeffrey R. Di Leo Tralfamadorians, who understand time, know that people only appear to die, because they're still very much alive in all the other moments oftheir life. On April 11 , 2007, Kurt Vonnegut will always have died. But that signature sardonic humor, that compassionate pessimism, all those foma, wampeters, and granfaloons, remain alive in the pages ofhis books. In those books, Vonnegut's great heart will continue to beat, forever unstuck in time. —Charles B. Harris VONNEGUTS-A MEMOIRRHOID It was a bright spring afternoon in Manhattan, and I was headed uptown. George Plimpton had arranged a gathering at Elaine's that he gave some kind of sappy name like Convergence ofGenius, or the Genius Club. It was meant to create an artistic, literary think tank. Many eminences like Joseph Heller, Robert Rauschenberg, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, and etc. were among the geniuses. I had just published The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968) and doors were opening for me, though I understood little about how to use this advantage. I was invited to this gathering but was too shy and insecure to know how to maintain myself among the literary/artistic glitterati. My seat was at a table with only Kurt Vonnegut and his friend, the photographer, Jill Krementz, whom he later married. I had almost crossed paths with Vonnegut before. Hejust left his teaching gig at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, when I started mine. I did meet Edie, his daughter, whom I liked a lot. She was finishing school there, an art major. Edie visited me at my apartment on Morton Street once, with her boyfriend, little Geraldo Rivera. He hadn't yet started on his way to being the media brute he is today. I could see he had little interest in what I was doing. Edie told me she'd shown my novel to her father, and he didn't know what to make of it. 1 wasn't attracted much to the writing in Cat's Cradle (1963), the only Vonnegut I'd read. My general social ineptitude and discomfort among geniuses conspired with those hovering opinions to make a nearly silent table. Mr. Vonnegut tried very hard to tell jokes and be jovial. Some of them must have been about the silly situation with geniuses. I might have enjoyed this under different circumstances. Jill Krementz enjoyed him immensely. I couldn't listen. I couldn't laugh. I could only think foolishly that we worked on different writing planets, his obviously more popular and lucrative. I didn't have the grace to break through socially to a more congenial posture. When I visited Dresden, I thought frequently ofVonnegut, ofhis distress after writing Slaughterhouse Five (1969). I was on a research trip to see all the paintings ofAntonello da Messina for my novel, Antonello's Lion (2004). Five months earlier I had emerged from a quad bypass extravaganza, and didn't know what my life would...

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style. – Kurt Vonnegut Most of us were drawn to science because, like Vonnegut, we found a subject we feel deeply about, not just because we wanted to write about it. However, all scientists recognize that research must be made known if it is to have lasting value. This is how science moves forward, with the shared word illuminating each step of discovery for the sake of others that follow. “Scientific writing” can be defined narrowly as the reporting of original research in journals or more broadly to encompass other ways that scientists share research information with one another, such as review articles, posters, and slide-based presentations. (The term “science writing” is often used for writing about science topics for the general public.) Whatever form it takes, successful scientific writing must answer basic questions and address problems raised during the dialogs that identify and define a given subject. It must be clear, concise, and follow established formats. In many ways, its language forms a dialect all its own. What is the most efficient way to write a paper or presentation that successfully covers all this? This book exists to help you tackle the task, step by step.

(2004). 'This Promising of Great Secrets': Literature, Ideas, and the (Re) Invention of Reality in Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Breakfast of Champions 'Fantasies of an Impossibly Hospitable World': Science Fiction and Madness in Vonnegut's Troutean Trilogy. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 261-272.

Comparing the three texts which are so varied in form and structure is a daunting task. However, one can always find similarities in the writing style of W.H. Auden, Eugene Ionesco and Kurt Vonnegut. Auden’s The Unknown Citizen is written in the voice of a fictional government bureaucrat and it uses parody to protest the numbing effects of modern life – its indifference towards individuality and identity. On the other hand, Ionesco’s The Leader is a one act bizarre and highly symbolic play. Both these works have used several symbols to bring along the main theme of the texts. Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron is a satirical science fiction tale about the dark side of an ideal, utopian American society. The common theme between the three texts is to showcase the absurdity underlying the American society and to reveal it by using satire (Hattenhauer, 1998).

Written by Vonnegut's friend and chief advocate in the academy, this title offers a definitive look at the writer's and nation's mutual influence. Vonnegut's death on April 11, 2007, marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture - a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Spanning Vonnegut's half-century literary career, Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of the fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged - and which it in turn helped shape. Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study traces Vonnegut's career, decade by decade, drawing connections between the nation's preoccupations, the author's biography, and his literary productions. Vonnegut's 1950s saw him starting out as a short story writer, using his training in anthropology and experience in journalism and public relations to offer comic insights on middle-class behaviors. In the 1960s the author produced a series of darkly humorous novels rooted in the sense of apocalypse he'd experienced as a prisoner of war during the destruction of Dresden, Germany. Vonnegut's rising fame made him a public figure by 1970, with his novels and increasingly prominent essays serving as commentaries on the trends and patterns of these changing times. By the 1980s Vonnegut was sufficiently comfortable with his celebrity status to offer broader perspectives in his work, including his take on human evolution and artistic development. The 1990s found Vonnegut writing the strongest fiction and commentary of his career, melding them into a masterpiece, Timequake, the virtual autobiography of a novel. Kurt Vonnegut's America charts the impact of Vonnegut on American society and of that society on Vonnegut over more than a half-century to illustrate how each informed the other. Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Far from being A Man without a Country, as his last book was titled, Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test - opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted.

The creative work of K.Vonnegut is studied due to the importance of his literary heritage not only inthe American literature, but also the enormous influence of his works on the world art process of the 20thcentury. K.Vonnegut was a comedy dramatist, a master of satire, black humor and science fiction. Skillfully combining various postmodern techniques in his prose, the writer described the realities of society,the consequences of war and human destinies with great skill. On the first page of most of his works, KurtVonnegut used metafiction. Metafiction – is a summary of events that reflects on himself and implies aviolation of the boundary between the inner world of the work and the world of literary creation. Thewriter had a unique manner of describing the little things of real life, thereby creating the fragmentation of his prose. At the same time, the author resorted to irony to describe the stupidity and insignificance ofthe real world. While describing events, K.Vonnegut often used black humor, which he called soft laughter, emphasizing the need for literature in this genre. For example, analyzing the work «SlaughterhouseNo 5», the researchers agree that it was the use of black humor that put this work on a par with the worksof prominent authors of the 20th century. Using black humor while describing death, the author createsin the reader a feeling of its absolute unimportance, causing nausea and emphasizing the absurdity of theworld. At the end of the work, the reader hates war as does Kurt Vonnegut. Having perfectly studied thelower layer of the American life, the writer was able to fully reveal the causes of moral backwardness,internal contradictions of society with the help of convincing artistic colors, typification, symbolization.Along with black humor, Kurt Vonnegut used such literary tools as fiction, grotesque and sarcasm. Andwith a deeper analysis, we will see that the writer used a large number of epithets, comparisons andmetaphors in his novels and articles. In addition, Vonnegut’s prose is autobiographical. Regardless ofwhat event the writer spoke about, he almost always resorted to personal experience, thereby makingthe work even more interesting giving funny or, on the contrary, tragic examples.In this sense, the reason that some of Vonnegut’s novels have a preface and others lack it is simple.The author used the autobiographical preface if the problems discussed in the book concerned the writerdirectly and were more of a private nature. And in the case of global problems, there was no need toupdate them through personal examples, since they were already clear to the vast majority of readers.

YES, 31, 2001 YES, 31, 2001 let alone designed and built it for that purpose. Using Herderian discourse of Romantic nationalism (Kampf, Reinheit; Volk; Heimat;Vaterland; Urvolk all occur) does not necessarilysettle the question that at the end of Kelsall's book still needs to be answered:Was it 'Jefferson,in the new world, who [... ] discovered romanticism for Europe' (p. I64), orwas it Kelsall,in the old world,who discoveredJeffersonfor romanticism? UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN W. M. VERHOEVEN TheUsablePast. TheImagination of Historyin RecentFictionof theAmericas.By Lois PARKINSON ZAMORA. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. I998. xiii + 257 pp. ?37.50; $59-95. Reading new fiction from the United States and Latin America together has been an especially good idea, ever since Jorge Luis Borges graced classic American authorswith his attention and writerssuch asJohn Barthand Robert Coover began reading and critiquingMagic Realism. Some say the key event was Kurt Vonnegut and Jose Donso sharing office space in 1966 as teachers at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. In the last three decades fiction from the two Americas has addressed similar themes, reaching sometimes different conclusions but similarly devoted to irrealistictechniques. The move of US writerstowardsmore innovative techniqueswas exceptionallynoteworthy;if Barth,Coover, and Vonnegut are to be believed, it was the LatinAmerican example thatpaved the way. In The UsablePast Lois Parkinson Zamora compares and contrasts these two literatures on the basis of how their authors respond to the problem of history. History itself is problematic because of the once-colonial status, and the major difference is that while Latin American developments have been inclusive of a broad range of times and cultures, the dominant US mode has been one of exclusiveness. Zamora finds an exception in the 'buried histories' (p. II) drawn upon by various minority writers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Toni Morrisonmost prominent among them. She also admiresthe 'discontinuous narrativestructures'used by SandraCisnerosto articulate'multiculturallayers of historyand myth' (pp. 163-64). But for the most partwritersnorth of the border remain driven by the combination of transcendentalromanticism and nineteenthcenturyGerman idealismthatforeseesa national manifestdestiny. When Zamora contraststhe work of Carlos Fuentes with that of Willa Cather, it is obvious how the former writer sees the past as immensely more problematic;in similar manner, her pairing of Borges with Nathaniel Hawthorne privileges the Argentinewriter'sunderstandingof how historyis created.It iswhen the criticlooks for examples among US contemporaries that her argumentsweaken, not because of any faultof theirown, but because her paradigmis unnecessarilylimited. Forher examples of the synchronic and the fragmentaryamong Latin American fictions, Zamora's choices are the best, but for US texts she prefers those critic Linda Hutcheon has typified as 'historiographicmetafiction'. The first half of this term suits Zamora's theme, but limiting recent innovations to what can be called metafictive (fiction whose subject is its own fictionality)omits the work of Barth, Coover, and Vonnegut, three of the writersmost influenced by what commentators called the boom in Latin American fiction. Instead, her most recent in-depth example of what non-minority writers are doing is William Goyen's TheHouseof Breath.Had Zamora looked beyond Hutcheon's metafictive paradigm she would have found US writersimmensely more adept at findinginnovative form in dealing with the constraintsand provocationsof history:among AfricanAmericansIshmael let alone designed and built it for that purpose. Using Herderian discourse of Romantic nationalism (Kampf, Reinheit; Volk; Heimat;Vaterland; Urvolk all occur) does not necessarilysettle the question that at the end of Kelsall's book still needs to be answered:Was it 'Jefferson,in the new world, who [... ] discovered romanticism for Europe' (p. I64), orwas it Kelsall,in the old world,who discoveredJeffersonfor romanticism? UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN W. M. VERHOEVEN TheUsablePast. TheImagination of Historyin RecentFictionof theAmericas.By Lois PARKINSON ZAMORA. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. I998. xiii + 257 pp. ?37.50; $59-95. Reading new fiction from the United States and Latin America together has been an especially good idea, ever since Jorge Luis Borges graced classic American authorswith his attention and writerssuch asJohn Barthand Robert Coover began reading and critiquingMagic Realism. Some say the key event was Kurt Vonnegut and Jose Donso sharing office space in 1966 as teachers at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop...