The Literature of Catastrophe

The Literature of Catastrophe PDF Author: Carlos Fonseca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501350641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar's manifestoes to Cesar Aira's use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas' posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

The Literature of Catastrophe

The Literature of Catastrophe PDF Author: Carlos Fonseca
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501350641
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book investigates how nature and history intertwined during the violent aftermath of the Latin American Wars of Independence. Synthesizing intellectual history and readings of textual production, The Literature of Catastrophe reimagines the emergence of the modern Latin American nation-states beyond the scope of the harmonious “foundational fictions” that marked the emergence of the nation as an organic community. Through a study of philosophical, literary and artistic representations of three catastrophic figures – earthquakes, volcanoes and epidemics – this book provides a critical model through which to refute these state-sponsored “happy narratives,” proposing instead that the emergence of the modern state in Latin America was indeed a violent event whose aftershocks are still felt today. Engaging a variety of sources and protagonists, from Simón Bolívar's manifestoes to Cesar Aira's use of landscape in his novels, from the revolutionary role mosquitoes had within the Haitian Revolution to the role AIDS played in the writing of Reinaldo Arenas' posthumous novel, Carlos Fonseca offers an original retelling of this foundational moment, recounting how history has become a site where the modern division between nature and culture collapses.

Cultivation and Catastrophe

Cultivation and Catastrophe PDF Author: Sonya Posmentier
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART 1: CULTIVATION -- 1 Cultivating the New Negro: The Provision Ground in New York -- 2 Cultivating the Nation: The Reterritorialization of Black Poetry at Midcentury -- 3 Cultivating the Caribbean: "The Star-Apple Kingdom," Property, and the Plantation -- PART 2: CATASTROPHE -- 4 Continuing Catastrophe: The Flood Blues of Sterling Brown and Bessie Smith -- 5 Collecting Catastrophe: How the Hurricane Roars in Zora Neale Hurston's -- 6 Collecting Culture: Hurricane Gilbert's Lyric Archive -- Coda: Unnatural Catastrophe -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z

The Cure for Catastrophe

The Cure for Catastrophe PDF Author: Robert Muir-Wood
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465096476
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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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.

Disaster Writing

Disaster Writing PDF Author: Mark D. Anderson
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813932033
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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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.

The Catastrophe of Modernity

The Catastrophe of Modernity PDF Author: Patrick Dove
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838755617
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This work examines four Latin American writers--Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Cesar Vallejo, and Ricardo Piglia--in the context of their respective national cultural traditions. The author proposes that a consideration of tragedy affords new ways of understanding the relation between literature and the modern Latin American nation-state. As an interpretive index, this tragic attunement sheds new light on both the foundational works of modern Latin American literature and the counter-foundational literary critiques of modernization and nation-building. Topics include Borges's short story "El Sur" in relation to the Argentine "civilization and barbarism" debate, Juan Rulfo's novella "Pedro Paramo in the context of post-revolutionary reflection on national identity in Mexico, and the lyric poetry of Cesar Vellajo's "Trilce. The reading is based on a juxtaposition of aporetically incompatible terms: mourning, the avant-garde, and Andean indigenism or messianism. The final section of the book investigates two novels by Ricardo Piglia, "Respiracion artificial and "La ciudad ausente, in the dual context of dictatorship and the market. Piglia's writing both echoes and marks a limit for tragedy as an interpretive paradigm.

Catastrophe

Catastrophe PDF Author: Richard A. Posner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195346394
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Catastrophic risks are much greater than is commonly appreciated. Collision with an asteroid, runaway global warming, voraciously replicating nanomachines, a pandemic of gene-spliced smallpox launched by bioterrorists, and a world-ending accident in a high-energy particle accelerator, are among the possible extinction events that are sufficiently likely to warrant careful study. How should we respond to events that, for a variety of psychological and cultural reasons, we find it hard to wrap our minds around? Posner argues that realism about science and scientists, innovative applications of cost-benefit analysis, a scientifically literate legal profession, unprecedented international cooperation, and a pragmatic attitude toward civil liberties are among the keys to coping effectively with the catastrophic risks.

Affective Intellectuals and the Space of Catastrophe in the Americas

Affective Intellectuals and the Space of Catastrophe in the Americas PDF Author: Judith Sierra-Rivera
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780814254950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
A study of contexts of crisis, which examines the role of writers and intellectuals in working toward social justice.

Romantic Climates

Romantic Climates PDF Author: Anne Collett
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030162419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This book seeks to uncover how today’s ideas about climate and catastrophe have been formed by the thinking of Romantic poets, novelists and scientists, and how these same ideas might once more be harnessed to assist us in the new climate challenges facing us in the present. The global climate disaster following Mt Tambora’s eruption in 1815 – the ‘Year without a Summer’ – is a starting point from which to reconsider both how the Romantics responded to the changing climates of their day, and to think about how these climatic events shaped the development of Romanticism itself. As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, climate is an inescapable aspect of Romantic writing and thinking. Ideologies and experiences of climate inform everything from scientific writing to lyric poetry and novels. The ‘Diodati circle’ that assembled in Geneva in 1816 – Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, John Polidori and John Cam Hobhouse and the gothic novelist MG ‘Monk’ Lewis – is synonymous with the literature of that dreary, uncanny season. Essays in this collection also consider the work of Jane Austen, John Keats and William Wordsworth, along with less well-known figures such as the scientist Luke Howard, and later responses to Romantic climates by John Ruskin and Virginia Woolf.

Mourning Modernism

Mourning Modernism PDF Author: Lecia Rosenthal
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823233979
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This book examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in twentieth-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Woolf, Benjamin, and Sebald, it engages the century's preoccupation with world-ending, a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. The spectacle of world-ending proliferates as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the end of all. In conversation with discussions of the century's passionfor the real, the author reads the century's obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between current interest in trauma and the sublime, she reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics from the lens of a late sublime

The Full Catastrophe

The Full Catastrophe PDF Author: Méira Cook
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 148700995X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Winner, 2023 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction Finalist, 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award A compassionate and funny novel about defining yourself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets propel. Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen-year-old boy born with intersex traits, would be happy to be left alone. Living with his artist mother in a derelict loft in downtown Winnipeg, perpetually wondering about the father who abandoned him, and tormented in school because of his differences, Charlie navigates the assorted catastrophes of his life. He’s helped along by the love of his beloved grandfather, Oscar, and the makeshift family who surround him: his mother’s best friend; a couple of elderly shut-in neighbours; a mysterious girl in his class who has secrets of her own; and his desperately needy and perpetually hungry dog, Gellman. When a school project leads him to discover that Oscar never had a bar mitzvah, Charlie decides to right the historical wrong and arrange a belated ceremony. But this quest will be more than he bargained for, and meanwhile everyone from his doctor to his Ancestry Studies teacher keeps insisting that Charlie needs to learn to tell his own story. Margaret Laurence Award winner Méira Cook’s The Full Catastrophe is a story of psychological complexity, tenderness, and humour.