Bloomsbury Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (Continuum Literary Studies)

Review "Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel does much to reposition Vonnegut as a major American writer. By approaching Vonnegut's oeuvre as an integrated postmodern iconography, a strategic project bridging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, Tally reveals Vonnegut to be a serious, deeply imaginative writer whose fictions intervene in major intellectual debates--political and theoretical--that continue to impact contemporary social developments." -Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture Product Description The novels of Kurt Vonnegut depict a profoundly absurd and distinctly postmodern world. But in this critical study, Robert Tally argues that Vonnegut himself is actually a modernist, who is less interested in indulging in the free play of signifiers than in attempting to construct a model that could encompass the American experience at the end of the twentieth century. As a modernist wrestling with a postmodern condition, Vonnegut makes use of diverse and sometimes eccentric narrative techniques (such as metafiction, collage, and temporal slippages) to project a comprehensive vision of life in the United States. Vonnegut's novels thus become experiments in making sense of the radical transformations of self and society during that curious, unstable period called, perhaps ironically, the American Century.' An untimely figure, Vonnegut develops a postmodern iconography of American civilization while simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of a truly comprehensive representation. About the Author Robert T. Tally Jr. is Associate Professor of English at Texas State University, USA, where he teaches American and world literature. Tally is the author of six books, including Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (Bloomsbury, 2014; named CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014), Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel: A Postmodern Iconography (Bloomsbury, 2011), and Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer (2009). He is the editor of four collections of essays, including The Geocritical Legacies of Edward W. Said: Spatiality, Critical Humanism, and Comparative Literature (2015).