- #Voneegut mother night audio book free download how to#
- #Voneegut mother night audio book free download series#
The picture loses its status as a trace or residue and becomes instead its most authentic reality-“picture or it didn’t happen.” In a world like this, in which everything is already multiply mediated and the self merely a polite fiction, the only thing to do is to perform performance. The real experience becomes a sign or reflection of its mediation.
#Voneegut mother night audio book free download how to#
Images from all over the world enter the home through the television set, advertisements tell us how to act, dress, eat, shop, and love. They connect otherwise unconnected places, preserve the past in the present, and mirror our ideal selves in the sitcom and the family photograph. Media and communications technologies are a crucial part of the weird relations of time and space in postmodernism. For a good part of the problem is not just about a failure of representation but also about an overabundance of mediation. It’s why so much postmodernism trades in the zany and the arch, especially at its most serious. How to represent this plosive, speedy, cartoonish, and deadly world? This, I tell my students, is the problem of postmodernism, and it’s why postmodernists turn to metafiction, satire, pop conspiracy, allusion, and genre fiction. Things that are far away come close, as in the fallout from nuclear weapons testing, whereas close things have impacts halfway around the world, as in unmanned drone strikes.
Yet things that once took weeks or months now happen in hours or days, the shipment guaranteed to arrive within two days of order. New materials like plastic distort our sense of the temporal as the most ephemeral of things become the most long-lasting, like the plastic water bottle lasting generations beyond the minutes it takes to use. It’s also a dislocation of scale, of the foundational assumptions of space and time. But it’s more serpentine than this suggests. If the modernist thing is centripetal, tending toward increasingly tight circles around a missing middle of meaning, then postmodernism is the explosive detonation of its spiraling intensity in a centrifugal splatter of contexts and contents: pink plastic disposable tampon applicators landing next to masterworks reprinted on shower curtains all against a background of total warfare, police violence, and political torture.
There are plenty of ways to teach postmodernism, but I tend to take it from the atom bomb outward. Are we still postmodern, then, contrary to literary critical claims to the contrary? What is the relation of the contemporary to the postmodern? Vonnegut is a postmodern writer, after all, whose novels have striking new currency in the contemporary period. But suddenly all of this feels unavoidably contemporary, and it has got me thinking about postmodernism. When I first read Mother Night a year or so ago, I wasn’t thinking much at all about Nazis or about fakes and forgeries. In other words, he hoaxed a hoax to show that the Holocaust is a hoax. Rockwell then cited the falseness of this story (a story he concocted) to demonstrate the falseness of all claims for the authenticity of the Holocaust. Gardell relates that in 1959 Rockwell wrote and published “a bogus story by a fabricated SS corporal relating how Jewish concentration camp inmates were used for vivisection experiments” (48). It reminds me of an anecdote I read recently in Mattias Gardell’s compelling monograph Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Supremacy about one of the first Holocaust deniers, the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell.
#Voneegut mother night audio book free download series#
Published in Russian in 1903, it got a boost in the American scene through a series of articles that appeared in Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Ostensibly the minutes from a series of secret meetings outlining a Jewish plot for world dominance, The Protocols has been shown repeatedly to be a fabrication plagiarized in large part from Maurice Joly’s Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Protocols is one of the most infamous examples of what currently travels under the moniker of fake news. The closest he came was a youthful encounter with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when he was a kid in the ’30s in Indianapolis. Kurt Vonnegut opens Mother Night, his third novel, by explaining that he is not and never has been a Nazi. By Dan Pyle in Magic and Feminism on JRebekah Sheldon
0 kommentar(er)
