So It Goes

Note: CATTt page updated (04-Apr)

(Have you been keeping “inventory” from respective readings?
Likely need to update your CATTt-egories and poetics, from past two weeks.)

M 6-Apr Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five (through Chapter 5)    (George Carter)   W 8-Apr Slaughterhouse Five (Chapters 6-7)     (David Lewis)   F 10-Apr Slaughterhouse Five (Chapters 8-10)    (Carter Louv)     Due: Response 6 (updated)

Response 6

500-600 words; 10 points
Due: Sat 11-Apr 11:59pm

 
Creative Writing Assignment — responding to Slaughterhouse Five.

Vonnegut provides the impetus for this imaginative assignment textually in several ways: the full title(s) of the novel; Billy Pilgrim’s profession (optometry); the Tralfamadorians’ perception (four dimensions); the formal (textual) breaks in the narrative, which compel us to “fill in the blanks.”
And as Barthes tells us, “the Text is experienced only in an activity of production…” (Review method.)

 
Task: Express a particular affect {feeling, mood, disposition, attitude, stance, subjective condition} that Vonnegut creates through Slaughterhouse Five.
Use the mode of indirection (figures), rather than explicitly stating or describing this affect.

So, first step: decide upon a specific affect that you have intuited from the novel. This can be about either Dresden or Vietnam, but likely more general, involving a feeling/stance toward both — I have presented Dresden as Vonnegut’s vehicle for addressing Vietnam, after all.

 
Method (parameters/expectations):

 
1) Using Vonnegut’s characters, compose brief scenes that occur “within the gaps” of the novel’s narrative(s) — in other words, inventive in imagining likely anecdotes or events based upon the information and characterization that Vonnegut provides. These will be original scenes, within the parameters of both history and the novel.

 
2) Form/composition: Fragments of narrative moments at respective times and places. (Suggested: 3-4 vignettes, minimum.) So, this can not be a linear narrative within one setting!

 
3) Hybrid discourse: creative (e.g. science/speculative fiction) and historical (accounts/facts). Permissible to include “metafictional elements” (e.g. voice of Vonnegut writing the novel), but not required.

 
4) Style: concrete and vivid imagery and/or figures, (i.e. not abstract/general); descriptive (explicit/realistic/evocative) language and dialogue. i.e. “write like Vonnegut” in terms of diction and tone.

 
5) Use “minor characters” (particular individuals) from the novel.
— after all, to whom is Slaughterhouse Five dedicated? (Consider rationale/effect….)

Examples:
Bernhard and Mary O’Hare
Valencia Merble
Lionel Merble
Barbara Pilgrim
Robert Pilgrim
Roland Weary
Edgar Derby
Werner Gluck
“The Blue Fairy Godmother”
Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
Bertram Rumfoord
Eliot Rosewater
Kilgore Trout
Montana Wildhack

Additionally: optional (extra credit)
200 words (separate entry); due M 12-Apr.

Read and respond to a classmate’s entry.
Describe the affect expressed (that you intuit from the fragments).
Evaluate the effectiveness or extent to which the entry is “unconventional discourse.” From this, (important) discuss “lessons” to take from Vonnegut for the poetics/method of our final project.