| Description |
1 online resource |
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text file rda |
| Contents |
Preface -- Introduction : Storyteller, Kurt Vonnegut and the American dream -- Prologue : Impossible dreams, a writer's education, 1922-1952 -- Player piano -- The sirens of titan -- Mother night -- Cat's cradle -- God bless you, Mr. Rosewater, or, Pearls before swine -- Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade : a duty-dance with death -- Breakfast of champions, or, Goodbye blue Monday! -- Slapstick, or, Lonesome no more! -- Jailbird -- Deadeye Dick -- Galápagos : a second Noah's ark -- Bluebeard -- Hocus pocus -- Timequake -- Epilogue : A man without a country, a "planetary citizen." |
| Summary |
In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and "winners" over "losers." Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut's outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality'something he once memorably described as "an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness." Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut's novels reflect the pain of his own life's experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books. |
| System Details |
Requires Boundless App. |
| Subject |
Vonnegut, Kurt.
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Vonnegut, Kurt -- Criticism and interpretation.
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Vonnegut, Kurt -- Characters.
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Vonnegut, Kurt. |
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Autobiography in literature.
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Self in literature.
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American Dream in literature.
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American Dream in literature. |
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Autobiography in literature. |
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Characters and characteristics. |
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Literature. |
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Self in literature. |
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America -- In literature.
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America. |
| Genre |
Electronic books. |
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Added Author |
Boundless (Digital media service)
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| ISBN |
9781609803605 : $49.90 |
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1609803604 : $49.90 |
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