One of the tricky things about having a class centered on the work of a single author is getting around that author’s blind spots. With Kurt Vonnegut, that means wrangling with the peculiar way women show up in his novels and his short stories. What impresses me so much about this paper is the way Lauren zeroes in on the particular problem of gender in Vonnegut’s fiction and elegantly applies a complicated theoretical lens to that problem. Lauren identifies moments in Vonnegut’s fiction that lend themselves to a reading according to Judith Butler’s work on performativity and gender expression. In so doing, she avoids some of the pitfalls that crop up with this sort of assignment—where either the exhibit source is an excuse to talk about method or argument, or the argument source becomes a pretext to recount juicy bits of story. Instead, this paper addresses the prompt—“discuss how the model of personal identity put forth in Vonnegut’s fiction fits in with a philosophical conception of selfhood we’ve discussed”—by actually reading Vonnegut and Butler together.
Lauren worked extraordinarily hard on this paper; she read the entirety of Butler’s Gender Trouble despite only being assigned an excerpt, and wholeheartedly participated in the peer-editing sessions. Further, her enthusiasm about the topic and the paper as a whole led her to meet with me several times and go through several rounds of editing, honing her paper into its best version of itself. That enthusiasm and hard work shines through in her clear, forthright prose and the paper’s overall excellent quality. Her paper offers her readers, including me, a new way to read the works she’s writing on, and that’s no small feat.
— KENNETH ALBA
WR 100: Kurt Vonnegut