Discourse and self in postmodernism: a reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s breakfast of champions (1973)‎

Abstract EN

Postmodernists have placed language and discursive practices at the heart of existence.

language is our (if not only) window to reality and the world.

the self (or the subject as postmodernists would prefer to call it) which has traditionally been considered autonomous, abstract, supernatural, or a metaphysical entity that one is supposed to search for, discover, know and control, in the postmodernist philosophy, it has become no more than a “social linguistic construct” (Booker, 1994, p.

81).

the person is no longer an autonomous, independent agent, but merely a puppet imprisoned within language games, which have no contact with reality.

the present paper is an attempt to investigate the effect of discourse and language, in postmodern world, on the concept of self in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions (1973).