Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture: Post-Millennial Perspectives on the End of the World

ISBN-13: 9780415712583 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 260 str.

Monica Germana; Aris Mousoutzanis

Opis

This interdisciplinary volume focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse, reflecting on its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. It offers a dynamic combination of theoretical speculation, textual analysis and historicisation, exploring four crucial areas of investigation: theory, space, time, and language. Authors examine how apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world's globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief. The apocalypse is generally understood as a complex and often paradoxical paradigm of contemporary culture. This book offers a new, post-millennial perspective that perceives 'the end' as immanent rather than imminent, and develops existing theoretical tendencies that approach apocalyptic fictions as fantastic displacements of contemporary social, cultural and political anxieties. It points to the many ways in which the apocalypse is spatialised and mapped across urban, virtual, and global spaces.This collection explores the widespread appeal of the apocalypse as one of the most pervasive preoccupations in the history of Western culture, and one that has served as a template to construct different sets of cultural anxieties throughout history.

Recenzje

"A compelling examination of ongoing crises, this book provides essential tools to unite the terminal and revelatory dimensions of apocalyptic discourse and mobilize it for thinking our future otherwise." -- Sherryl Vint, Professor of Science Fiction Media Studies, University of California, Riverside, USA

Spis treści

Introduction: After the End? Monica Germanà & Aris Mousoutzanis Part 1: Theory  1. Apocalyptic Security: Biopower and the Changing Skin of Historic Germination Lee Quinby  2. To Have Done with the End Times: Turning the Apocalypse into a Non-Event Sophie Fuggle  3. Are Ruses Necessary to Evade Catastrophe? On Slavoj Žižek’s Endorsement of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s "Faire comme si le pire était inevitable" John Vignaux Smyth  4. The Apocalyptic Sublime: Then and Now Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik Part 2: Space, Place and Environment  6. The Post-Apocalyptic Sublime: A Gothic Response to Contemporary Environmental Crisis in John Burnside’s Glister (2009) Emily Horton  7. Under the Westway and Up in the Air: New Brutalist Aftermath Aesthetics in J.G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975) Joanne Murray  8. Escape / Landscape / Genderscape: No Futures for Women Elizabeth Russell  9. ‘Soul Delay’: Trauma and Globalization in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003) Aris Mousoutzanis  Part 3: Time and History  10. The Not so Cozy Catastrophe: Re-Imagining the British Disaster Novel in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Brian Aldiss’s Barefoot in the Head (1969)  Christopher Daley  11. Apocalyptic Themes in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (2009) Magdalena Zolkos  12. "Billows of Ash": Cormac McCarthy’s Road Back to Auschwitz  Francesca Haig  13. The Ambassadors of Nil: Notes on the Zombie Apocalypse Alexandra Warwick and David Cunningham  Part 4: Language and the End of the Word  14. Language Decay and Creation in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction William Abberley  15. "What are all those things he once thought he knew, and where have they gone?": The End of the Wor(l)d in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) Monica Germanà  16. Zpocalypse Adam C. Roberts