Postmodern apocalypse : theory and cultural practice at the end / edited by Richard Dellamora.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Dellamora, Richard.

Series:

New cultural studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Apocalyptic art.

Postmodernism.

Arts, Modern--20th century.

Arts, Modern.

Physical Description:

xiii, 296 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennysylvania Press, 1995.

Summary:

From accounts of the Holocaust, to representations of AIDS, to predictions of environmental disaster; from Hal Lindsey's fundamentalist 1970s best-seller The Late Great Planet Earth, to Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, the sense of apocalypse is very much with us. In Postmodern Apocalypse, Richard Dellamora and his contributors examine apocalypse in works by late twentieth-century writers, filmmakers, and critics.

In a set of chapters that provide a historical account of the place of the apocalyptic in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, the authors confront the uncritical exploitation of apocalyptic imagery in emergent postmodern culture. David Robson argues that Northrop Frye's validation of apocalypse in Anatomy of Criticism helped shape the creation of "apocalyptic space" in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon. Mary Wilson Carpenter analyzes the millenarian thinking that shaped much first-wave feminist polemic. Richard Dellamora argues that, in the initial debates between proponents of post-structuralism and (the passing) New Criticism, the figure of William Burroughs became the sign of a queer apocalypse that threatened the basic tenets of humanism. Ken Cooper considers the responses to the nuclear threat registered by African American writers ranging from Richard Wright to Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver. In addition the contributors explore such topics as the (heterosexualized) William Burroughs of David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch; the rap music of Ice-T; the rush toward apocalyptic judgment of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians; and William Gibson's Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), the ultimate apocalyptic hypertext, which erases itself as it unscrolls.

Contents:

I. Jews, Gentiles, and Fascists

Coitus Interruptus: Fascism and the Deaths of History / Andrew Hewitt 17

At Last, All the Goyim: Notes on a Greek Word Applied to Jews / Jonathan Boyarin 41

II. First-Generation Postmodern Apocalyptics

Frye, Derrida, Pynchon, and the Apocalyptic Space of Postmodern Fiction / David Robson 61

The Whiteness of the Bomb / Ken Cooper 79

Representing Apocalypse: Sexual Politics and the Violence of Revelation / Mary Wilson Carpenter 107

Queer Apocalypse: Framing William Burroughs / Richard Dellamora 136

III. Contemporary Apocalyptics

Can the Apocalypse Be Post? / Teresa Heffernan 171

Cyborg Economies: Desire and Labor in the Terminator Films / Kevin Pask 182

The Cyborg Manifesto Revisited: Issues and Methods for Technocultural Feminism / Linda Howell 199

"Go-go Dancing on the Brink of the Apocalypse": Representing AIDS / Peter Dickinson 219

O.G. Style: Ice-T/Jacques Derrida / Darren Wershler-Henry 241

An Absolute Acceleration: Apocalypticism and the War Machines of Waco / Christopher Keep 262

Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book / Peter Schwenger 277.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0812233204

0812215583

OCLC:

32509167