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. Vonnegut’s experimentation with these narrative elements reveals the postmodern relative assimilation of fiction and reality.īeginning with the question "what constitutes jazz poetry?", this paper elucidates the musico-historical link between blues and jazz genres. The character’s discourse is approached via employing Mikhail Bakhtin’s modes of dialogic discourse. The narrator will be scrutinized by applying Gérard Genette’s concept of the focalization factor. The analysis of the novel’s plot will rely on Patricia Waugh’s self-reflexive metafictional devices. Rather, it is a beginning of ideological dialogic fiction between the text and the world. Thus, metafiction does not formulate the beginning of new genre signifiers.
The central differentiation being made, then, is that accurately postmodern metafiction and what might be considered therapeutic experimentation in a self-justifying manner. The critique is oftentimes utilized in order to proclaim a literary complex relation which lies between the author and the reader. For this reason, self-reflexive metafiction being discussed conflates fictional experimental forms with ideological critique which attests to its fictionality in the name of replenishing manipulation. It will be argued that Vonnegut mixes real experiences with fictional accounts. Vonnegut accomplishes his critique through manipulating the novel’s plot, narrator, and character’s discourse. Accordingly, this study explores Vonnegut’s critique of literary exhaustion prevailing modernism’s exhausted literary forms in order to provide them with permanent literary replenishment. That is, the literature of exhaustion and the literature of replenishment dominating modern literature. On the outset of postmodernism, two critical issues have been raised. The study focuses on Vonnegut’s experimentation which assents to postmodern innovative virtuosity. This article demonstrates how Kurt Vonnegut experiments with the narrative structure of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Such voice originates in the main narrative point of view in the text and is known as focalization. For this later style, the self-justifying manner in the novel extrapolates textual dialogic relations to accentuate the author’s critical voice.
What makes the majority of metafictional style unique is not only its presence in the novel, but also its conflated depiction of the American individual’s suffering after the Second World War. Accordingly, the article uses Patricia Waugh, Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin’s narrative theory to examine the experimental technique in the novel. Experimentation is thus remedial replenishment for such exhaustion through authorial metafictional intrusion into the text. Vonnegut experiments with the narrator, setting and characters of the novel to provide a fictional critique of the literary exhaustion prevailing in modern literary modes.
As a novel recapitulating within itself a postmodern relative perspective of reality, it elucidates one aspect of postmodernism, that of literary experimentation.
This article explores Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) as a postmodern critique of modern literary modes. 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.
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