Granfalloon 2022
Granfalloon 2022 is presented concurrently with the Indiana University Writers Conference and the Bloomington Handmade Market. Events take place in venues on campus and around downtown Bloomington. The festival offers engaging creative experiences from art and theater to film, live music, crafts, writing, puppets, the Nature Tour of the Century, and more.
Many of the Granfalloon 2022 events and activities pay homage to Vonnegut’s 1986 novel Galapagos, in which Kurt grapples with big questions about evolution, environmental degradation, global economic collapse, and the many, many problems caused by big human brains. (Can you imagine living in such a world?)
About the Playlist
On the right-hand side of this page, you'll see a brief playlist we've curated, highlighting selected songs from the musical artists featured at this year's Granfalloon Festival. These artists include Lung, Slow Pulp, Divino Niño, NNAMDÏ, and Car Seat Headrest, as well as Indiana natives Oreo Jones and Japanese Breakfast. Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" button in the application to save.
Spotlight on Vonnegut's Galapagos
Galápagos, Vonnegut's eleventh novel, takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.
Translations:
The IU Libraries hold a number of translations of Galapagos, in whole or in part, including editions in Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, German, Swedish, French, Dutch, Hebrew, Slovak, Czech, Japanese, Chinese, and Polish.
Critical explorations:
Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut by Call Number: PS3572.O5 Z773 2011 (Wells Library - Research Coll. - Stacks)ISBN: 9781933146997Publication Date: 2011-01-30Historically, an investigation into the impact of science and technology on society is nothing new to the area of literature; in fact it has been done for centuries. However, this book is relevant in its attempt to understand, in Vonnegut's novels, how Darwin's theory of evolution functions as a cosmogonic myth that is widely accepted in order to explain why the world is as it is and why things happen as they do, to provide a rationale for social customs and observances, and to establish the sanctions for the rules by which Vonnegut's characters conduct their lives. Moreover, this book deals with how and why Kurt Vonnegut's fiction represents the changing human image resulting from Darwinism. Includes the essay "The principles of the evolutionary mythology in Galápagos."
Close Reading the Anthropocene by Call Number: ON ORDERISBN: 0367466597Publication Date: 2021-06-01he volume's wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies. Includes the essay "From scale to antagonism: reading the human in Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos" by C. Parker Krieg.
Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut by Call Number: ON ORDERISBN: 9780367858551Publication Date: 2020-07-01"Posthumanism in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Matter That Complains So re-examines the prevailing critical consensus that Kurt Vonnegut was a humanist writer. While more difficult elements of his work have often been the subject of scholarly attention, the tendency amongst critics writing on Vonnegut is to disavow them, or to subsume them within a liberal humanist framework. When Vonnegut's work is read from a posthumanist perspective, however, the productive paradoxes of his work are more fully realised." Includes the essay "Galapagos : writing on air."
Kurt Vonnegut and the American Novel by Call Number: PS3572.O5 Z8638 2011 (Wells Library - Research Coll. - Stacks)ISBN: 9781441164452Publication Date: 2011-10-13Includes the essay "Apocalypse in the optative mood: Galápagos."
Kurt Vonnegut and the Centrifugal Force of Fate by Call Number: PS3572.O5 Z775 2009 (Wells Library - Research Coll. - Stacks)ISBN: 9780786439935Publication Date: 2009-01-27He was a Merlin among Men of Letters. Open any Kurt Vonnegut book and the words come to life in rapport with the reader like broomsticks enthralled by a book of spells.How did he do it? Through early drafts of projects like Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse 5 and Harrison Bergeron, sensationally different from the published stories, Gary McMahon peers over the shoulder of a man without a country and an American institution. We get to see the original manuscripts and spend time with the complete works, from Player Piano to Armageddon in Retrospect, including a rare comparison of Vonnegut's journalism with peers like Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe.
Unstuck in Time by Call Number: PS3572.O5 Z863 2011 (Wells Library - Research Coll. - Stacks)ISBN: 9781609803490Publication Date: 2011-11-08Gregory Sumner guides readers, with insight and passion, through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works. He gives readers a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success and individualism. Instead of a celebration of these values, readers share Vonnegut's outrage, his broken-hearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality.
A More Perfect Place? Resources on New Harmony, Indiana
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Harmony, Indiana, was settled in 1814 by the followers of the German pietist George Rapp. A decade later, the settlement was purchased by the Welsh cotton manufacturer and philanthropist Robert Owen, who renamed it New Harmony and attempted to establish a community there based on utopian social and educational ideals.
New Harmony is believed to have provided the inspiration for Vonnegut's New Ambrosia, the (doomed) utopian community that features in his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965). Learn more about New Harmony's rich nineteenth-century history as a utopian and intellectual community.
"Harmonie, 1816." From Cottman, Centennial History and Handbook of indiana. Public domain. Source: Internet Archive, via Wikimedia Commons.