Author: Michael Titlestad
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351850628
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239
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Book Description
The world keeps turning to apocalypticism. Time is imagined as proceeding ineluctably to a catastrophic, perhaps revelatory conclusion. Even when evacuated of distinctly religious content, a broadly ecclesial structure persists in conceptions of our precarious life and our collective journey to an inevitable fate—the extinction of the human species. It is commonly believed that we are propelled along this course by human turpitude, myopia, hubris or ignorance, and by the irreparable damage we have wrought to the world we inhabit. Yet, this apprehension is insidious. Such teleological convictions and crises-laden narratives lead us to undervalue contingent, hesitant and provisional forms of experience and knowledge. The essays comprising this volume concern a range of writers’ engagements with apocalyptic reasoning. Extending from a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Triumph of Life’ to critiques of contemporary American novels, they examine the ways in which ‘end times’ reasoning can inhibit imaginative reflection, blunt political advocacy or – more positively – provide a repertoire for the critique of complacency. By gathering essays concerning a wide range of periods and literary dispositions, this volume makes an important contribution to thinking about apocalypticism in literature but also as a social and political discourse. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studia Neophilologica.
Author: Brent Ryan Bellamy
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819580333
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels imagine human responses to the aftermath of catastrophe. The shape of the future they imagine is defined by "the remainder," when what is left behind expresses itself in storytelling tropes. Since 1945 the portentous fate of the United States has shifted from the irradiated future of nuclear holocaust to the saltwater wash of global warming. Theorist Brent Ryan Bellamy illuminates the political unconscious of post-apocalyptic writing, drawing on a range of disciplinary fields, including science fiction studies, American studies, energy humanities research, and critical race theory. From George R. Stewart's Earth Abides to N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, Remainders of the American Century describes the tension between a reactionary impulse and the progressive impetus for a new world. "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." "Brent Ryan Bellamy weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of fictions, all of which navigate the changing valences of apocalypse, survival, and remainders during the rise and fall of the post-Second World War 'American Century.' Given the global post-apocalyptic reality we all currently inhabit, this is a timely and significant study." —Gerry Canavan, author of Octavia E. Butler
Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008434050
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 80
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Book Description
The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.
Author: Jessica Hurley
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452962677
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
A new approach to the vast nuclear infrastructure and the apocalypses it produces, focusing on Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American literatures Since 1945, America has spent more resources on nuclear technology than any other national project. Although it requires a massive infrastructure that touches society on myriad levels, nuclear technology has typically been discussed in a limited, top-down fashion that clusters around powerful men. In Infrastructures of Apocalypse, Jessica Hurley turns this conventional wisdom on its head, offering a new approach that focuses on neglected authors and Black, queer, Indigenous, and Asian American perspectives. Exchanging the usual white, male “nuclear canon” for authors that include James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ruth Ozeki, Infrastructures of Apocalypse delivers a fresh literary history of post-1945 America that focuses on apocalypse from below. Here Hurley critiques the racialized urban spaces of civil defense and reads nuclear waste as a colonial weapon. Uniting these diverse lines of inquiry is Hurley’s belief that apocalyptic thinking is not the opposite of engagement but rather a productive way of imagining radically new forms of engagement. Infrastructures of Apocalypse offers futurelessness as a place from which we can construct a livable world. It fills a blind spot in scholarship on American literature of the nuclear age, while also offering provocative, surprising new readings of such well-known works as Atlas Shrugged, Infinite Jest, and Angels in America. Infrastructures of Apocalypse is a revelation for readers interested in nuclear issues, decolonial literature, speculative fiction, and American studies.
Author: Ruben Borg
Publisher: Brill / Rodopi
ISBN: 9789004390348
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220
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Book Description
In Fantasies of Self-MourningRuben Borg describes the formal features of a posthuman, cyborgian imaginary at work in modernism. The book's central claim is that modernism invents the posthuman as a way to think through the contradictions of its historical moment. Borg develops a posthumanist critique of the concept of organic life based on comparative readings of Pirandello, Woolf, Beckett, and Flann O'Brien, alongside discussions of Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, Béla Tarr, Ridley Scott and Mamoru Oshii. The argument draws together a cluster of modernist narratives that contemplate the separation of a cybernetic eye from a human body--or call for a tearing up of the body understood as a discrete organic unit capable of synthesizing desire and sense perception.
Author: Alison McQueen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107152399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251
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Book Description
From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of history's greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccol- Machiavelli in the midst of Italy's vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during England's bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.
Author: John Hay
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316997421
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 590
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Book Description
The idea of America has always encouraged apocalyptic visions. The 'American Dream' has not only imagined the prospect of material prosperity; it has also imagined the end of the world. 'Final forecasts' constitute one of America's oldest literary genres, extending from the eschatological theology of the New England Puritans to the revolutionary discourse of the early republic, the emancipatory rhetoric of the Civil War, the anxious fantasies of the atomic age, and the doomsday digital media of today. For those studying the history of America, renditions of the apocalypse are simply unavoidable. This book brings together two dozen essays by prominent scholars that explore the meanings of apocalypse across different periods, regions, genres, registers, modes, and traditions of American literature and culture. It locates the logic and rhetoric of apocalypse at the very core of American literary history.
Author: Gero Bauer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
Explores the emphasis that contemporary novels, films and television series place on the present, arguing that hope emerges from the potentiality of the here and now, rather than the future, and as intimately entangled with negotiations of structures of belonging. Taking its cue from an understanding of hope as connoting an organizing temporality, one which is often presumed to be projecting into a future, Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction challenges this understanding, arguing that hope emerges in practices of relationality in the present, disentangling hope from a necessary correlation with futurity. Through close readings of contemporary works, including The Road, The Walking Dead, Cloud Atlas, Sense8, The People in the Trees and A Little Life, Gero Bauer investigates how these texts explore structures of kinship as creative and affective practices of belonging and care that claim spaces beyond the heterosexual, reproductive nuclear family. In this context, fictional figurations of the child – often considered the bearer of the future – are of particular interest. Through these interventions into definitions of and reflections on fictional manifestations of hope and kinship, Bauer's analyses intersect with queer theory, new materialism and postcritical approaches to literature and cultural studies, moving towards counterintuitively hopeful readings of the present moment.
Author: David M. Bethea
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
David Bethea examines the distinctly Russian view of the "end" of history in five major works of modern Russian fiction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Vittoria Guarino
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346975126
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 51
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Department of English and American Studies), course: Text & Discourse Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This paper delves into the highly debated topic of climate change and its communication across social media, particularly on the platform X (formerly Twitter). Recognizing the profound global implications of climate change discourse, the study focuses on linguistic analysis at the lexical level, examining semantic patterns in environmental discourse. The goal is to identify distinctive language devices, including lexemes, phrases, clauses, figures of speech, and idiomatic expressions, and link them to the discourse categories of tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse as defined by Foust and O'Shannon. The analysis involves closely examining selected Tweets from the database, aiming to categorize them based on these discourse frames. The paper outlines the methodology, defines discourse framing and environmental discourse categories, and concludes with a summary of findings and an outlook on communication modalities in the current discourse about climate change on social media.
