Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

M.A. Essay

First Advisor

Klaus J. Milich

Second Advisor

Rebecca B. Clark

Abstract

This essay interrogates the humanist impulses of Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five and István Örkény in One-minute Stories and Tóték, grounding their postmodern humanism in a 1960s relational and anti-systemic critique of modern humanism, and locating it in a geometry of the grotesque based on Flannery O’Connor’s theory in Mystery and Manners. In the works of Örkény and Vonnegut, the grotesque becomes a set of distorted relations: their characters find themselves in anti-human worlds where systems of power (war, bureaucracy, the capitalist or communist economy) warp the expected relationships between humans and other humans, the natural world, and social systems. This world is mapped from the smallest element (the grotesque linguistic sign) to the largest (the grotesque narrative) to establish a governing geometry that serves to reveal anti-human systems through the production of both a defamiliarizing logic and, drawing on Eugenie Brinkema, a diagrammatic affect. Both authors depict these distorted worlds and evoke the “freak” as a reductio ad absurdum argument for humanism, regrounding the human by exposing systems that produce absurdity. Repositioning the authors’ humanist impulses as a necessary feature of, rather than a companion or counterpoint to, their grotesque prose reframes both humanism and the grotesque in the postmodern context as systemic terms capable of subsuming seemingly disparate aesthetic features and holding the unreconciled binaries of human/other and affect/reflection.

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