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| Kurt Vonnegut in August 2006, less than a year before his death. |
Here's a collection of obituaries and tributes to Vonnegut filed after his death in April 2007. You might want to read over a few prior to Thursday's class, when we'll try to sum up our work this quarter and find some basic lessons and ideas to take away from the eight novels we've read:
- The San Francisco Chronicle (an obit written many years before KV's death)
So it goes, and you go as well, from the confines of this class on to (I dare to hope) a life-long relationship with literature. I heard someone complaining before class started that she had nothing to read now that the school year was over, and believe me, I can sympathize. The benefit to you having just spent the last ten weeks so thoroughly immersing yourself in Vonnegut's life and writing, however, is that you're primed to keep reading through his collected works (well, presuming that you actually liked the course), so here are my suggestions.
I'm starting with the idea of what I'd add to the book list should I have the opportunity to teach this class again under semesters. In rough formulaic fashion, here's what I'd plan:
I will admit to being somewhat torn about the three additional books listed here. Breakfast of Champions is not Vonnegut's finest hour, but it's probably the most useful book to add, since it makes connections between and fills out backstories of characters and places that are central to both Deadeye Dick and Galápagos and is largely focused on Kilgore Trout. Mother Night provides a lot of backstory for Howard Campbell, who we meet in Slaughterhouse-Five, and also helps bridge the eleven-year gap between Player Piano and Cat's Cradle, but I'm personally not as enamored of Vonnegut's earlier style where he's feeling a little more bound by the rules of contemporary fiction. Bluebeard is probably the best of the three books, but aside from a tiny connection to Deadeye Dick, it exists in its own world — still, not a bad choice if you're interested in learning more about Vonnegut's feelings on the purpose and usefulness of art, or to get more insights into his second marriage. The Sirens of Titans (dedicated to Uncle Alex) isn't a bad choice either, particularly if you're into early sci-fi Vonnegut. The only two books I'd steer clear of entirely (or at least until you've read the rest) are Slapstick (which at the very least has some worthwhile remembrances of Vonnegut's sister Allie and Uncle Alex) and Hocus Pocus (which doesn't).
What about the short story collections? Well, I did consider using Welcome to the Monkey House for this class, but my feeling was that a) it can be difficult for students to transition from the macro-scale of novels to the micro-scale of stories, and b) those stories are conceived more for popular audiences, so they're not quite as substantive as Vonnegut's other writing. If you're interested in some short attention span delights, however, there are four volumes altogether, including Bagombo Snuff Box and the two posthumous editions published in recent years. What might be a better place to go are the volumes of essays, speeches, interviews, etc.: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; Fates Worse than Death; A Man Without a Country.
And, after spending the last ten weeks telling you not to read it, I think you're prepared to bear the full brunt of Vonnegut's personality as revealed in Charles J. Shields wonderful biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut — A Life. It's a fantastically thorough document of the author's life and times, and provides all sorts of useful background on Vonnegut, his family, his writing process and much more. Not unlike many of the novels we've read, it ultimately feels incomplete and overwhelmingly sad in the end, but that's more the fault of Vonnegut's dog than Shields.
Interested in some postmodern fiction outside of Vonnegut? Two authors whose names came up in class the other day, and who I can wholeheartedly recommend are Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan.
Barthelme's one of my very favorite writers, not to mention one of the most influential prose stylists in 20th century literature. If you'd like to dip your toe in the water before buying anything, you can read a number of his best-known stories here. Should be be eager for more, I'd suggest starting with the collections Sixty Stories and/or Forty Stories, plus the novels Snow White and The Dead Father (though start with the stories and work up to the novels). When I first started reading Barthelme, the posthumous volumes containing the rest of his stories hadn't yet been published, so I had to track down the individual collections (all of which are pretty ubiquitous and cheap), of which my favorites are City Life, Amateurs and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts.
For Brautigan, most of his work is now available in omnibus editions reprinting three books under one cover. His best known novel is Trout Fishing in America, and some of his other books published in those collections that I'm quite fond of include The Abortion, A Confederate General from Big Sur and Revenge of the Lawn, along with the poetry collections Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt and The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Perhaps my favorite Brautigan book altogether, though one you'll have to hunt down on the used market, is The Tokyo-Montana Express. You can find more info on him here.
Those of you who haven't had the Beat Generation class with me might want to check out Jack Kerouac (start with On the Road, then try The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur) or William S. Burroughs (start with Junkie or Naked Lunch then try Exterminator!, Interzone or the Nova Trilogy novels). Beyond that (but hey, you're running out of summer at this point, right?) here are a few other favorites I've taught (or would like to teach) in classes on postmodern American fiction:
What about the short story collections? Well, I did consider using Welcome to the Monkey House for this class, but my feeling was that a) it can be difficult for students to transition from the macro-scale of novels to the micro-scale of stories, and b) those stories are conceived more for popular audiences, so they're not quite as substantive as Vonnegut's other writing. If you're interested in some short attention span delights, however, there are four volumes altogether, including Bagombo Snuff Box and the two posthumous editions published in recent years. What might be a better place to go are the volumes of essays, speeches, interviews, etc.: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons; Palm Sunday; Fates Worse than Death; A Man Without a Country.
And, after spending the last ten weeks telling you not to read it, I think you're prepared to bear the full brunt of Vonnegut's personality as revealed in Charles J. Shields wonderful biography, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut — A Life. It's a fantastically thorough document of the author's life and times, and provides all sorts of useful background on Vonnegut, his family, his writing process and much more. Not unlike many of the novels we've read, it ultimately feels incomplete and overwhelmingly sad in the end, but that's more the fault of Vonnegut's dog than Shields.
Interested in some postmodern fiction outside of Vonnegut? Two authors whose names came up in class the other day, and who I can wholeheartedly recommend are Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan.
Those of you who haven't had the Beat Generation class with me might want to check out Jack Kerouac (start with On the Road, then try The Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels, Big Sur) or William S. Burroughs (start with Junkie or Naked Lunch then try Exterminator!, Interzone or the Nova Trilogy novels). Beyond that (but hey, you're running out of summer at this point, right?) here are a few other favorites I've taught (or would like to teach) in classes on postmodern American fiction:
- Susan Sontag — primarily an essayist/theorist, but her short story collection, I, etcetera is great
- Don Delillo — White Noise and Mao II are classics of the era
- Thomas Pynchon — The Crying of Lot 49 is a good introduction to his work
- Robert Coover — I've had great pleasure teaching The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. and Pricksongs and Descants
- Ron Loewinsohn — Magnetic Field(s) is a true sleeper — a marvelous book no one seems to know about
- E.L. Doctorow — Ragtime is where most folks start
Of course, my true love and focus over the past five years or so has been poetry. If you're looking for reading suggestions in that genre, just drop me a line.
Thanks for the suggestions!
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