Identity Crisis

A State of the Union Address

Authors

  • Lawrence R. Broer University of South Florida Author

Keywords:

identity, masculinity, selfhood, postwar American literature, authorial persona, cultural anxiety

Abstract

No two contemporary writers have looked harder or with greater analytical intelligence at the forces undermining the American Dream than Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. Whatever individual differences of vision or temperament may separate these brooding seers, Mailer, the mystic Existentialist, and Kurt Vonnegut, the comic Absurdist, serve as shamans, spiritual medicine men whose function is to expose various forms of societal madness—dispelling the evil spirits of greed, irresponsible mechanization, and aggression while encouraging reflection and the will to positive change.

Author Biography

  • Lawrence R. Broer, University of South Florida

    Lawrence R. Broer, Professor Emeritus at the University of South Florida, earned his PhD from Bowling Green State University. The author or editor of eight books, including Hemingway’s Spanish Tragedy (U of Alabama P, 1973), Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (U of Alabama P, 1994), and Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (U of Alabama P 2002). Professor Broer has contributed essays to numerous anthologies of literary criticism and authored eighty articles and critical papers on modern and postmodern literature.

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Published

2026-02-10

Issue

Vol. 2 No. 1 (2008): In Memorium

Section

Articles