Narratives of Catastrophe PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Narratives of Catastrophe PDF full book. Access full book title Narratives of Catastrophe by Nasrin Qader. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Nasrin Qader
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
Narratives of Catastrophe tells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of "down turn" and "break," and narration as "recounting" in the senses suggested by the French term récit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa. Qader's book begins by exploring the political implications of narrating catastrophic historical events. Through careful readings of singular literary texts on the genocide in Rwanda and on Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco under the reign of Hassan II, Qader shows how historical catastrophes enter language and how this language is marked by the catastrophe it recounts. Not satisfied with the extra-literary characterizations of catastrophe in terms of numbers, laws, and naming, she investigates the catastrophic in catastrophe, arguing that catastrophe is always an effect of language andthought,. The récit becomes a privileged site because the difficulties of thinking and speaking about catastrophe unfold through the very movements of storytelling. This book intervenes in important ways in the current scholarship in the field of African literatures. It shows the contributions of African literatures in elucidating theoretical problems for literary studies in general, such as storytelling's relationship to temporality, subjectivity, and thought. Moreover, it addresses the issue of storytelling, which is of central concern in the context of African literatures but still remains limited mostly to the distinction between the oral and the written. The notion of récit breaks with this duality by foregrounding the inaugural temporality of telling and of writing as repetition. The final chapters examine catastrophic turns within the philosophical traditions of the West and in Islamic thought, highlighting their interconnections and differences.
Author: Nasrin Qader
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823230503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
Narratives of Catastrophe tells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of "down turn" and "break," and narration as "recounting" in the senses suggested by the French term récit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa. Qader's book begins by exploring the political implications of narrating catastrophic historical events. Through careful readings of singular literary texts on the genocide in Rwanda and on Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco under the reign of Hassan II, Qader shows how historical catastrophes enter language and how this language is marked by the catastrophe it recounts. Not satisfied with the extra-literary characterizations of catastrophe in terms of numbers, laws, and naming, she investigates the catastrophic in catastrophe, arguing that catastrophe is always an effect of language andthought,. The récit becomes a privileged site because the difficulties of thinking and speaking about catastrophe unfold through the very movements of storytelling. This book intervenes in important ways in the current scholarship in the field of African literatures. It shows the contributions of African literatures in elucidating theoretical problems for literary studies in general, such as storytelling's relationship to temporality, subjectivity, and thought. Moreover, it addresses the issue of storytelling, which is of central concern in the context of African literatures but still remains limited mostly to the distinction between the oral and the written. The notion of récit breaks with this duality by foregrounding the inaugural temporality of telling and of writing as repetition. The final chapters examine catastrophic turns within the philosophical traditions of the West and in Islamic thought, highlighting their interconnections and differences.
Author: Nasrin Qader
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823247189
Category : African fiction (French)
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
Narratives of Catastrophe tells the story of the relationship between catastrophe, in the senses of "down turn" and "break," and narration as "recounting" in the senses suggested by the French term récit in selected texts by three leading writers from Africa. Qader's book begins by exploring the political implications of narrating catastrophic historical events. Through careful readings of singular literary texts on the genocide in Rwanda and on Tazmamart, a secret prison in Morocco under the reign of Hassan II, Qader shows how historical catastrophes enter langua.
Author: Mark D. Anderson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the aftermath of disaster, literary and other cultural representations of the event can play a role in the renegotiation of political power. In Disaster Writing, Mark D. Anderson analyzes four natural disasters in Latin America that acquired national significance and symbolism through literary mediation: the 1930 cyclone in the Dominican Republic, volcanic eruptions in Central America, the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, and recurring drought in northeastern Brazil. Taking a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the disaster narratives, Anderson explores concepts such as the social construction of risk, landscape as political and cultural geography, vulnerability as the convergence of natural hazard and social marginalization, and the cultural mediation of trauma and loss. He shows how the political and historical contexts suggest a systematic link between natural disaster and cultural politics.
Author: Kate Rigby
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936896
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse human and nonhuman factors in their causation, unfolding, and aftermath. Focusing on the link between the ways disasters are framed by the stories told about them and how people tend to respond to them in practice, Rigby also shows how works of narrative fiction invite ethical reflection on human relations with one another, with our often unruly earthly environs, and with other species in the face of eco-catastrophe. In its investigation of an array of authors from the Romantic period to the present—including Heinrich von Kleist, Mary Shelley, Theodor Storm, Colin Thiele, and Alexis Wright— Dancing with Disaster demonstrates the importance of the environmental humanities in the development of more creative, compassionate, ecologically oriented, and socially just responses to the perils and possibilities of the Anthropocene. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism
Author: Kasia Mika
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351403036
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book uses narrative responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a starting point for an analysis of notions of disaster, vulnerability, reconstruction and recovery. The turn to a wide range of literary works enables a composite comparative analysis, which encompasses the social, political and individual dimensions of the earthquake. This book focuses on a vision of an open-ended future, otherwise than as a threat or fear. Mika turns to concepts of hinged chronologies, slow healing and remnant dwelling. Weaving theory with attentive close-readings, the book offers an open-ended framework for conceptualising post-disaster recovery and healing. These processes happen at different times and must entail the elimination of compound vulnerabilities that created the disaster in the first place. Challenging characterisations of the region as a continuous catastrophe this book works towards a bold vision of Haiti’s and the Caribbean’s futures. The study shows how narratives can extend some of the key concepts within discipline-bound approaches to disasters, while making an important contribution to the interface between disaster studies, postcolonial ecocriticism and Haitian Studies.
Author: Domenico Cecere
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN: 8833139085
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume deals with natural disasters in late medieval and early modern central and southern Italy. Contributions look at a range of catastrophic events such as eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, floods, earthquakes, and outbreaks of plague and epidemics. A major aim of this volume is to investigate the relationship between catastrophic events and different communication strategies that embraced politics, religion, propaganda, dissent, scholarship as well as collective responses from the lower segments of society. The contributors to this volume share a multidisciplinary approach to the study of natural disasters which draws on disciplines such as cultural and social history, anthropology, literary theory, and linguistics. Together with analyzing the prolific production of propagandistic material and literary sources issued in periods of acute crisis, the documentation on disasters studied in this volume also includes laws and emergency regulations, petitions and pleas to the authorities, scientific and medical treatises, manuscript and printed newsletters as well as diplomatic dispatches and correspondence.
Author: Daniel Betrand Monk
Publisher: OR Books
ISBN: 9781682192771
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
It is all worse than we think. It is even worse than Mike Davis, for whom "every day is judgment day" (The Nation), could have imagined. The contributions to this volume are explorations of what Davis-in typical wry fashion-once referred to as the field of "disaster studies." Collectively, they show how our "disaster imaginary" has been rendered inadequate by the existing order's ability to feed off and coopt our resistance to it. Contemporary mass protests are now subsumed as instances of an established, profitable politics of rage. Geopolitical conflict poses not as a threat to hegemonic power but rather serves the interests of a global market which capitalizes on lucrative, permanent war. Climate change itself, if it was ever thought to be a universalizing phenomenon, is now treated as an extensive market opportunity by global risk insurance conglomerates and predatory lenders who bet against any rescue of the planet. Such catastrophic developments resist the language we use to describe and deconstruct them. The contributions to this volume seek to reimagine our understanding of disaster, and, following the example of Davis himself, to refuse outdated models of political transcendence as vigorously as they reject narratives of resignation.
Author: Robert Muir-Wood
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096476
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Get Book Here
Book Description
We can't stop natural disasters but we can stop them being disastrous. One of the world's foremost risk experts tells us how. Year after year, floods wreck people's homes and livelihoods, earthquakes tear communities apart, and tornadoes uproot whole towns. Natural disasters cause destruction and despair. But does it have to be this way? In The Cure for Catastrophe, global risk expert Robert Muir-Wood argues that our natural disasters are in fact human ones: We build in the wrong places and in the wrong way, putting brick buildings in earthquake country, timber ones in fire zones, and coastal cities in the paths of hurricanes. We then blindly trust our flood walls and disaster preparations, and when they fail, catastrophes become even more deadly. No society is immune to the twin dangers of complacency and heedless development. Recognizing how disasters are manufactured gives us the power to act. From the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 to Hurricane Katrina, The Cure for Catastrophe recounts the ingenious ways in which people have fought back against disaster. Muir-Wood shows the power and promise of new predictive technologies, and envisions a future where information and action come together to end the pain and destruction wrought by natural catastrophes. The decisions we make now can save millions of lives in the future. Buzzing with political plots, newfound technologies, and stories of surprising resilience, The Cure for Catastrophe will revolutionize the way we conceive of catastrophes: though natural disasters are inevitable, the death and destruction are optional. As we brace ourselves for deadlier cataclysms, the cure for catastrophe is in our hands.
Author: Robert Bell
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498534775
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Get Book Here
Book Description
The edited collection, Eco Culture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse, opens a conversation about the mediated relationship between culture and ecology. The dynamic between these two great forces comes into stark relief when a disaster—in its myriad forms and narratives—reveals the fragility of our ecological and cultural landscapes. Disasters are the clashing of culture and ecology in violent and tragic ways, and the results of each clash create profound effects to both. So much so, in fact, that the terms ecology and culture are past separation. We are far removed from their prior historical binaric connection, and they coincide through a supplementary role to each other. Ecology and culture are unified.
Author: Mike Scalise
Publisher: Sarabande Books
ISBN: 1941411347
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 190
Get Book Here
Book Description
“A very funny [memoir] about the frailties of the flesh, the absurdities of modern medicine, and how to stay sane amid it all” (Dave Eggers). Raucous family memoir meets medical adventure in this “winning literary debut” that explores the public and private theaters of illness (The New York Times Book Review). After a pituitary tumor bursts in Mike Scalise’s brain (diagnosed, by of all people a physician named Dr. Sunshine), it leaves him with a hole in head, and the hormone disorder acromegaly at age twenty-four. He also faces the exasperating challenge of navigating a new, alien world of illness maintenance among family, friends, and spouse. However, it’s his mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, who becomes a complicated model as she competes with her son for the status of “best sick person.” “Captur[ing] all the fright of a medical calamity and the humor and grace necessary to survive it (Kirkus Reviews), “Mike Scalise’s startling and slyly hilarious memoir is a heartfelt reminder of how astonishing, how terrifying, how absurd it is to be a body. An essential book for those who’ve lived through catastrophe, or only imagined it” (Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine).
