One of the tricky things about having a class centered on the work of a single author is getting around that author\u2019s 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\u2019s fiction and elegantly applies a complicated theoretical lens to that problem. Lauren identifies moments in Vonnegut\u2019s fiction that lend themselves to a reading according to Judith Butler\u2019s work on performativity and gender expression. In so doing, she avoids some of the pitfalls that crop up with this sort of assignment\u2014where 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\u2014\u201cdiscuss how the model of personal identity put forth in Vonnegut\u2019s fiction fits in with a philosophical conception of selfhood we\u2019ve discussed\u201d\u2014by actually reading Vonnegut and Butler together.<\/p>\n
Lauren worked extraordinarily hard on this paper; she read the entirety of Butler\u2019s\u00a0Gender Trouble<\/em>\u00a0despite 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\u2019s overall excellent quality. Her paper offers her readers, including me, a new way to read the works she\u2019s writing on, and that\u2019s no small feat.<\/p>\n \u2014 KENNETH ALBA\u00a0<\/strong> One of the tricky things about having a class centered on the work of a single author is getting around that author\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4801,"featured_media":0,"parent":12095,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12134"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4801"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12134"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12177,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12134\/revisions\/12177"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/writingprogram\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWR 100:\u00a0Kurt Vonnegut<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"