Bucky
Hugh Kenner's tour of Fuller is literary, skeptical, and admiring at once. He treats Fuller as a coordinate-system thinker whose maps, domes, and inventions change how the world can be read.
Core structure
- What Am I Doing Here?
- The Star-Spinner
- The Outlaw Area
- Modeling the Universe
- Bubbles and Destiny
- Dymaxion Messiah
- Later chapters on domes, dialogue, and incoming ideas
Main ideas
- The Dymaxion Map is not just a map; it is a corrective to habitual world pictures.
- Fuller's work joins engineering, language, and metaphor.
- Kenner sees Fuller as a maker of models for thinking, not merely objects.
- The book tracks Fuller's public weirdness and technical seriousness together.
- Fuller's geometry becomes a way to challenge inherited assumptions.
Why it matters
This is a strong interpretive companion for readers who want Fuller through a literary lens. It shows how his inventions function as arguments about perception, modernity, and the shape of knowledge.
See Also
- American Dreamer (American Dreamer) — biographical companion portrait
- Cosmography (Cosmography) — late synthesis of Fuller's world-view
- Buckminster Fuller (Buckminster Fuller) — autobiographical scenario of the same life
- Hugh Kenner (Hugh Kenner) — author of this book