"What is at stake in a literature?" investigation of the postmodern in Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Cat's Cradle" from a Lyotardian perspective

This study aims to explore how Kurt Vonnegut's works fit into Lyotard's view of postmodern art and "what is at stake in a literature." Departing from the similarities in their approach to issue of literary representation, two of Vonnegut's novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle are investigated from a Lyotardian perspective. Taken in the context of trauma literature, Slaughterhouse-Five focuses on the problem of representation on an individual level in terms of "the differend." Cat's Cradle deconstructs the metanarratives of science and religion, and explores the possibility of presentation based on alternative, "petit récit" that do not conform to the established discourses. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is built on Lyotard's ideas about the postmodern and the postmodern aesthetics as the aesthetic of the sublime sentiment, as influenced by Kantian philosophy, Freudian meta-psychology and Wittgenstein's theory of 'language games'.