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Dystopian cybernetic environment in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five


Citation

Babaee, Ruzbeh and Wan Yahya, Wan Roselezam and Sivagurunathan, Shivani (2014) Dystopian cybernetic environment in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 4 (2). pp. 237-243. ISSN 1799-2591

Abstract

Cybernetics is particularly well-suited to cultural history since it resonated with an American cultural mood that included World War II anxieties and worries that communism indicated that human beings could degenerate into unthinking, perfectly intelligent machines. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) illustrates people who become enslaved to a controlling system of cybernetics that carries out its power through time and war. In this study, I examine Slaughterhouse-Five in which the cybernetic system creates a dystopian society and reduces human beings into obedient robots. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five demonstrates that cybernetics as a metaphor for control of the mind leaves no space for individuals to decide for their own lives. This analysis investigates the ways through which cybernetics manipulates human beings in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.


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Additional Metadata

Item Type: Article
Divisions: Faculty of Modern Language and Communication
DOI Number: https://doi.org/10.4304/tpls.4.2.237-243
Publisher: Academy Publisher
Keywords: Cybernetics; Dystopia; War; Time; Machine; Mind control
Depositing User: Nabilah Mustapa
Date Deposited: 05 Aug 2015 01:06
Last Modified: 21 Aug 2015 02:25
Altmetrics: http://www.altmetric.com/details.php?domain=psasir.upm.edu.my&doi=10.4304/tpls.4.2.237-243
URI: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/37180
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