The cultural life of catastrophes and crises / edited by Carsten Meiner, Kristin Veel.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Meiner, Carsten.

Veel, Kristin.

Series:

Concepts for the Study of Culture (CSC)

Concepts for the study of culture ; 3

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Catastrophical, The, in motion pictures.

Catastrophical, The, in literature.

Catastrophical, The, in art.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (332 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin ; Boston : De Gruyter, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Catastrophes and crises are exceptions. They are disruptions of order. In various ways and to different degrees, they change and subvert what we regard as normal. They may occur on a personal level in the form of traumatic or stressful situations, on a social level in the form of unstable political, financial or religious situations, or on a global level in the form of environmental states of emergency. The main assumption in this book is that, in contrast to the directness of any given catastrophe and its obvious physical, economical and psychological consequences our understanding of catastrophes and crises is shaped by our cultural imagination. No matter in which eruptive and traumatizing form we encounter them, our collective repertoire of symbolic forms, historical sensibilities, modes of representation, and patterns of imagination determine how we identify, analyze and deal with catastrophes and crises. This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire's eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.

Contents:

Front matter

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. THINKING CATASTROPHES AND CRISES

The Cultural Analysis of Disaster / HOLM, ISAK WINKEL

Catastrophic Turns - From the Literary History of the Catastrophic / ELIASSEN, KNUT OVE

Making Crises and Catastrophes - How Metaphors and Narratives shape their Cultural Life / NÜNNING, ANSGAR

The Metaphysics of Catastrophe - Voltaire's Candide / MEINER, CARSTEN

Adorno's Idea of Art as the Revelation of a Permanent and Universal Catastrophe / SOEWARTA, AGUS

II. WITNESSING AND REMEMBERING CATASTROPHES AND CRISES

Memory Crisis - Remembering and Forgetting in Post-genocide Rwanda / NYIRUBUGARA, OLIVIER

Catastrophe, Documentary and the Limits of Cinematic Representation / ŠPRAH, ANDREJ

The Excess of Kali Yuga - Repetition, Remembrance and Longing / JOSHI, SARAH A.

The Visual Literacy of Disaster in Ernst Jünger's Photo Books / CAPELOA GIL, ISABEL

Dreaming the American Nightmare - The Cultural Life of 9/11 / KOOIJMAN, JAAP

III. IMAGINING CATASTROPHES AND CRISES

Macbeth - The Catastrophe of Regicide and the Crisis of Imagination / KALLENBACH, ULLA

"The Dead shall inherit the Dead" - After Life and beyond Catastrophe in Mark Strand's Post-Apocalyptic Poetry / DIETRICH, RENÉ

September 11 and the Disruption of Singularity / GONÇALVES, DIANA

Resounding Catastrophe - Auditory Perspectives on 9/11 / BJØRNSTEN, THOMAS

The Frailty of Everything - Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Modern Disaster Discourse / WINKEL HOLM, ISAK

IV. DESIRING AND CONSUMING CATASTROPHES AND CRISES

The Aesthetics of Catastrophe - Edmund Burke on Sympathy / HANKOVSZKY, ANIKÓ

Kunst macht frei - Misrepresenting the Holocaust in Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell / MACKINTOSH, ALEX

The New Flesh - A Variation on David Cronenberg's Videodrome and Pierre Klossowski's La monnaie vivante / PERRET, CATHERINE

"Nobody came, nobody settled, nobody shopped" - When the World ends in a Mall: Dawn of the Dead, WALL-E, The Wild Blue Yonder / BRODESCO, ALBERTO

Freak Ecology - An Introduction to the Fictional History of Natural Disaster / WIND MEYHOFF, KARSTEN

List of Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781283856997

1283856999

9783110282955

311028295X

OCLC:

821198750