Název: Lucrative art of disaster: fetishized apocalypse, culture of fear and hurricane 'Tammy' in Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow
Zdrojový dokument: Brno studies in English. 2021, roč. 47, č. 1, s. 157-180
Rozsah
157-180
-
ISSN0524-6881 (print)1805-0867 (online)
Trvalý odkaz (DOI): https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-1-9
Trvalý odkaz (handle): https://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/144299
Type: Článek
Jazyk
Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International
Upozornění: Tyto citace jsou generovány automaticky. Nemusí být zcela správně podle citačních pravidel.
Abstrakt(y)
With an eye to the visibly growing predilection for imagining humanity under siege in a rather disquietingly vulnerable state since Hiroshima's trauma up until the contemporary times, the present paper attempts to examine Nathaniel Rich's Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) through an ecological lens that takes fear as its central thematic concern with connection to the perception of (eco-)apocalypse. Ecological thinking, whether fictional or factual, seems to have been closely linked to the narratives of the future with an underlying Cassandran foreboding spirit. The narrativization of proleptically apocalyptic visions of human civilization, though drenched in fear and anxiety, essentially serves a survival-enhancing purpose. However, the over-zealous embrace of the catastrophic end-of-times prophecies seems paradoxically to have an adverse effect trapping us in a web of fear-induced paralysis, desensitization through repetitive exposure, and vulnerable susceptibility towards opportunistic maneuverings. Odds Against Tomorrow, dealing with the most common apocalyptic fears of the contemporary age, grapples profoundly with the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a culture alarmingly drenched in fear and acutely obsessed with risk-aversion.
Note
This text is a result of the project SGS04/FF/20189 "Ecocritical Perspectives on 20th and 21st-Century American Literature" supported by the internal grant scheme of the University of Ostrava.
Reference
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[2] Atwood, Margaret (2014) Why readers and writers are so fixated with dystopian visions. Financial Times. Accessed on March 16, 2016. https://www.ft.com/content/cc4a4c26-aaff-11e3-be01-00144feab7de.
[3] Aveni, Anthony (2016) Apocalyptic Anxiety: Religion, Science, and America's Obsession with the End of the World. Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado.
[4] Beck, Ulrich (1989) On the way to the industrial risk-society? Outline of an argument. Thesis Eleven 23, 86–103. | DOI 10.1177/072551368902300106
[5] Beck, Ulrich (2009) World at Risk. Translated by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[6] Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
[7] Brown, Stephen, Jim Bell, and David Carson (1996) Apocaholics anonymous: looking back on the end of marketing. In: Brown, Stephen and Jim Bell and David Carson (ed.) Marketing Apocalypse: Eschatology, Escapology and the Illusion of the End. London: Routledge, 1–20.
[8] Buell, Frederick (2003) From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. New York: Routledge.
[9] Buell, Lawrence (1995) The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
[10] Campbell, Joseph (2008) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd ed. Novato, California: New World Library.
[11] Canavan, Gerry (2012) Hope, but not for us: ecological science fiction and the end of the world in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 23 (2), 138–159.
[12] Caputo, John D. (1993) Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
[13] Carson, Rachel (2002) Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[14] Cohn, Norman (1995) How time acquired a consummation. In: Bull, Malcolm (ed.) Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Oxford: Blackwell, 21–37.
[15] Collins, Adela Yarbro (2011) Apocalypse now: the state of apocalyptic studies near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The Harvard Theological Review 104 (4), 447–457. | DOI 10.1017/S001781601100040X
[16] Curry, Alice (2013) Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[17] Dixon, Wheeler W. (2003) Visions of the Apocalypse: Spectacles of Destruction in American Cinema. London: Wallflower Press.
[18] Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
[19] Edinger, Edward F. (1999) Archetype of the Apocalypse: A Jungian Study of the Book of Revelation. Edited by George F. Elder. Chicago: Open Court.
[20] Estok, Simon C. (2013) Terror and ecophobia. Frame 26 (2), 87–100.
[21] Farand, Chloe (2018) Extinction rebellion eyes global campaign. Ecologist, November 23. Accessed on April 27, 2019. https://theecologist.org/2018/nov/23/extinction-rebellion-eyes-global-campaign.
[22] Fava, Sergio (2013) Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art: Designing Nightmares. New York: Routledge.
[23] Fortunati, Vita (1993) The metamorphosis of the apocalyptic myth: from utopia to science fiction." In: Kumar, Krishan and Stephen Bann (ed.) Utopias and the Millennium. London: Reaktion Books, 81–89.
[24] Garrard, Greg (2012) Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.
[25] Glassner, Barry (2009) The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things. New York: Basic Books.
[26] Gottschall, Jonathan (2012) The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
[27] Hamilton, Edith (1942) Mythology. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
[28] Joyce, Stephen (2018) Transmedia Storytelling and the Apocalypse. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.
[29] Jung, Carl Gustav (1976) The Collected Works of C. G. Jung: Symbols of Transformation. 2nd ed. Edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Vol. V. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
[30] Kermode, Frank (2000) The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford.
[31] Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer (1996) Millennial ecology: the apocalyptic narrative from Silent Spring to Global Warming. In: Herndl, Carl G. and Stuart C. Brown (ed.) Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 21–45.
[32] Lomborg, Bjørn (2019) It's cheaper to talk than to cut emissions. Project Syndicate, May 17. Accessed on 5 25, 2019. https://www.lomborg.com/news/its-cheaper-to-talk-than-tocut-emissions.
[33] Mehnert, Antonia (2016) Climate Change Fictions: Representations of Global Warming in American Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance. American Psychological Association 1–70. Accessed on February 28, 2021.
[34] Mill, John Stuart (1873) On perfectibility. In: Autobiography. London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 288–309.
[35] Moore, Bryan L. (2017) Ecological Literature and the Critique of Anthropocentrism. Jonesboro, AR: Palgrave Macmillan.
[36] Moore, Hamilton (1986) The problem of apocalyptic as evidenced in recent discussion. IBS 13, 77–91.
[37] Nesse, Randolph, and George Williams (1997) Are mental disorders diseases? In: Baron-Cohen, Simon (ed.) The Maladapted Mind: Classic Readings in Evolutionary Psychopathology. Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, 1–22.
[38] Northover, Richard Alan (2016) Ecological apocalypse in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy. Studia Neophilologica 88 (Sup1), 81–95. | DOI 10.1080/00393274.2015.1096044
[39] Oxford Student (2019) Oxford professor argues invisible aliens are interbreeding with humans. April 26. Accessed on April 28, 2019. https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2019/04/26/oxford-professors-theory-on-climate-change-and-alien-abduction/
[40] Rich, Nathaniel (2013) Odds Against Tomorrow: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[41] Russell, David S. (1978) Apocalyptic: Ancient and Modern. London: SCM Press.
[42] Schwartz, Hillel (2011) The escathology of everyday things, England 1600–1800. In: Force, James E. and Richard H. Popkin (ed.) The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics, and Everyday Anglo-American Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture: Volume III. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 171–180.
[43] Siegel, Marc (2005) False Alarm: The Truth about the Epidemic of Fear. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
[44] Sinclair, Upton (1994) I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[45] Stephens, Elizabeth M., and Annie M. Sprinkle. n.d. Ecosex manifesto. Accessed on April 24, 2019. http://sexecology.org/research-writing/ecosex-manifesto/
[46] Thunberg, Greta (2019) 'Our house is on fire': Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate. The Guardian, January 25. Accessed February 25, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urgesleaders-to-act-on-climate.
[47] Tupper, E. Frank (1975) The revival of apocalyptic in biblical and theological studies. RevExp 72 (3): 279–303.
[48] Vagianos, Alanna (2019) 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. Huffpost, March 14. Accessed on April 27, 2019. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-activist-greta-thunberg-nobel-peace-prize_n_5c8a4ab8e4b0fbd7662145a4.
[49] Weber, Samuel (2015) Foreword: One sun too many. In: Szendy, Peter (ed.) Apocalypse-cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World, translated by Will Bishop. New York: Fordham University Press, ix–xx.
[50] Weissmann, Jordan (2019) What the Christchurch killer's manifesto tells us. Slate, March 15. Accessed on April 28, 2019. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/03/what-thechristchurch-attackers-manifesto-tells-us.html.
[51] White, E. B. (2011) Here is New York. reprint. New York: The Little Bookroom.
[52] Wojcik, Daniel N. (1997) The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America. New York: NYU Press.
[53] Yedroudj, Latifa (2019) Oxford university teacher says aliens are already breeding with humans on earth. Mirror, April 27. Accessed on April 28, 2019.
[54] Žižek, Slavoj (2011) Living in the End Times. London: Verso.