FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
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“The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse”: Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner
Get PDFThis paper surveys some of the developments in apocalyptic writing in recent decades, and then examine the use of apocalypse in George Turner\u27s science fiction novels. Global events such as World War Two, terrorism, the Cold War, and increasing environmental problems have contributed to a growth in apocalyptic fictions. While novels warning about the dangers of nuclear war were prolific in post-WWII speculative literature, other issues such as technological and ecological disaster have since become dominant threats. Apocalypse literally means revelation, but the popular imagination more frequently associates it with widespread destruction. The form therefore offers a useful approach for writers keen to protest against political systems, harmful environmental policies, and reckless technological and scientific experimentation. Apocalypse allows authors to extrapolate from current events and imagine a terrible future should certain actions be taken. In Turner\u27s novels, seemingly utopic societies have arisen after future catastrophes have devastated the world. Yet in reality these new societies are brutal and totalitarian regimes. Turner utilises apocalyptic themes and imagery to interrogate scientific, social and environmental policies and warn about looming environmental catastrophes if society does not address current problems of complacency and short-sighted governing
The Critical Mass of Language: Post-Trinity Representation
Get PDFTo its viewers, the first atomic bomb test (codenamed "Trinity") appeared as not merely a dazzling, unprecedented leap forward in the history of science, not merely the swift, fiery eradication of all of their long-held fears and anxieties concerning the success of the project, but also a monumental event in the history of language (Thomas Farrell saw in it "that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately"). This article seeks to interrogate not only the poeticizing of the Trinity test by its architects and the subsequent revulsion toward the event felt by artists worldwide, but also the representational dilemma that the possibility of a "poetic" bomb creates: how can artistic representation of the invisible, the sublime, and the incomprehensible adapt itself to the new technological sublimity of the merciless, neutral variety that the bomb incarnates? The article addresses this question through a study of both nonliterary texts (eyewitness accounts) and literary representation (a reading of Richard Powers\u27s The Time of Our Singing and William Faulkner\u27s Nobel Prize speech). Its conclusion is that the bomb, pace the accounts of the Trinity eyewitnesses, in fact less suggests a variety of representation that renders all others insignificant (thus exempting it from moral, social, or spiritual concerns) than it insists upon the reimagining of older poetic tropes. Trinity, by suggesting an apocalyptic conflict between older modes of signification and the new "atomic poetics," in fact symbiotically relies upon the traditions from which it splits
"The vanguard - and the most articulate audience": Queer Camp, Jack Smith and John Waters
Get PDFI wish to take the "Camp eye" as a point of departure for an examination of camp (lower-case "c") as a way of seeing, a set of relations with the world, a mode of artistic production, a refined form of irony, and an effective mode of critique. To do this I feel we must avoid Sontag\u27s stress on "campy" objects, and instead look at what she calls the "vulgar" use of the term as a verb: "to camp." As a verb, camp implies activity and process; this invigorates the radical possibilities that lie within it. I will however tentatively suggest not a "canon" but a tradition of camp ways of seeing, a distinctly queer avant-garde tradition full of intertextual cross-referencing, allusion, and mutual admiration. The two figures I have chosen to illustrate this more contingent concept of camp are John Waters and Jack Smith. This essay will involve a reading of two re-released films: Smith\u27s Flaming Creatures (1962) and Waters\u27s Pink Flamingos (1972). Both films have earned great notoriety in terms of efforts to censor their distribution due to "obscene" (explicit, homoerotic, transvestite) content, and an equally avid following with circulation ranging from East Village midnight screenings to Congressional hearings
Putting on the Red Dress: Reading Performative Camp in Douglas Sirk\u27s All That Heaven Allows
Get PDFCamp comes into being as a performative vernacular when naturalized constructions of gender and sexuality are questioned through the enactment of their inherent contradictions. As subjects that are feminized through heteronormative ideology, both women and gay men may have a similar attentiveness, or what Keith Harvey describes as a "semiotic awareness," for the signs that are inscribed upon them and through which they negotiate their place in society (Harvey, 407). When this predilection for signs is acted out in the ironic performance of camp, as an artistic vernacular that expresses the ways in which women and gay men suffer as bearers of the passivity, emotionality and inactivity inscribed upon them, the performance may in turn become a radical site of destabilizing activity.With this in mind, the film genre of the melodrama, and in particular the work of Douglas Sirk, provides an interesting site for exploring representational traces of the inter-subjective positioning of women and gay men for two central reasons: [1] as a genre that is well known for narrativizing the pain and suffering of women, it may have something to say of the conditions which propel this pain and suffering; and [2] the work of Sirk, as a director who relied heavily upon distanciation, or distancing effects, to highlight artifice, demonstrates incongruencies between naturalized and constructed versions of heteronormativity much in the same way as camp does when utilized as a performative vernacular. I will focus on the 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, taking into account the ways in which gender and sexuality are performed through the film in such a manner that demonstrates conflicts surrounding hetero/homo binaries within representations of the period that can be productively read within a matrix of performative camp
Dude Looks Like A Lady: Straight Camp and the Homo-social World of Hard Rock.
Get PDFMadison Square Garden. 1973. Robert Plant, the 25 year old singer and frontman of Led Zeppelin, undoubtedly the world\u27s biggest rock band, takes to the stage in front of another sell out crowd. He is dressed in his trademark outfit of blue denim jeans and snakeskin boots. His torso is conspicuously left uncovered beneath a blue shirt several sizes too small. His muscular biceps are hugged by its gathered sleeves, presumably worn with the intention of creating a sense of oriental opulence but actually suggesting nothing more exotic than a woman\u27s blouse. As he flicks aside his lustrous mane of blond curls he delivers the opening lines of Black Dog in his trademark high-pitched wail; "Hey, hey, mama. Said the way you move. Gonna make you sweat. Gonna make you groove."As this short description shows, Plant exhibits the androgynous appeal of the classic rock god in all his glory. That this androgyny came to function as a social marker of absolute masculinity, however, suggests a far more complex interplay of identities within the hard rock genre than the more obviously playful ambiguities explored by gender pioneers like David Bowie or Prince. That Robert Plant continues to be all man, while simultaneously looking and sounding like a woman, suggests that the straight camp of the rock god provides a more complex function than the questioning of gender roles. To discover what this function is, and its central role in the hard rock genre\u27s categorization as a virtual bastion of unreconstructed masculinity, we must begin by sketching a brief history of its musical roots
Scenes from the Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Get PDFAt their zenith, empires become haunted by images of their inevitable demise. This article examines historical theories of imperial decline, as exemplified by the works of Edward Gibbon, C-F Volney and Oswald Spengler, and suggests a recurring concern with \u27revolutionary orientalism\u27 in such writings. The USA is currently in its late-imperial decadent phase, and much given in consequence to apocalyptic or catastrophic narratives. These are hardly new - the late-Victorian British Empire produced a large number of disaster fictions hardly less spectacular, with H G Wells foremost amongst his contemporary catastrophists - London is destroyed many hundreds of times in the period\u27s fiction. The article closes with an analysis of 9/11 fictions and theories, and looks particularly at the novels of Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer
Apocalyptic Nostalgia in the Prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld
Get PDFCharacters in Don DeLillo\u27s novels repeatedly grapple with the existential contradiction which Frank Kermode has called the "immanent apocalypse" and which Jean Baudrillard has identified as a nuclear "implosion." DeLillo\u27s fictions commonly depict the post-apocalyptic sensibility Kermode and Baudrillard describe; a historical transition from the conventional kind of apocalypse - the end that will happen - to the postmodern variety - the end that is always already happening. DeLillo\u27s most concise illustration of this condition is arguably the prologue to his 1997 opus, Underworld. Originally published in 1993 in Harper\u27s as "Pafko at the Wall," this 50-page vignette tells the story of the famous Dodgers-Giants game in 1951, the game concluded by Bobby Thompson\u27s three-run, game-winning, pennant-deciding homer that came to be known as "The Shot Heard \u27Round the World." DeLillo evokes and manipulates the nostalgia inherent in this collective memory to dramatize the manner in which apocalypticism enters into the structure of Cold War perception. According to DeLillo\u27s conceit in the prologue, the crack of Thompson\u27s bat announces the postmodernizing of the apocalyptic imagination in the American psyche. This narrative device allows DeLillo to interrogate the apocalyptic shift from various points of view, as well as to induct the reader into a sense of his or her own situatedness within this historical reinscription
This is the End: Earth First! and Apocalyptic Utopianism
Get PDFThis essay looks at the role of violence within radical environmentalist groups, such as ELF or Earth FIRST!, that engage in or support the use of ecotage or monkeywrenching. By looking at the philosophical underpinnings of monkeywrenching in terms of apocalyptic and utopian discourses within the movement, the author argues that violence against property functions to create a form of subjectivity that can account for the dialectic tension and irreconcilability of utopian and apocalyptic discourses within the group. This tension, with its simultaneous elevation and denigration of the Human, is fundamental to the ecological subjectivity of the members and allows them to act despite a truly apocalyptic belief in the reality of biological meltdown.In addition to providing a way to escape paralysis within such an apocalyptic framework, the eco-warrior functions within the group as well as within larger environmental circles to provide a counter-narrative to benign images of industrial progress by providing an archetypal figure of resistance that marries the modern-primitive, nature-culture, and apocalyptic-utopian together. As such, the author argues that the narrative violence of the eco-warrior provides a way to mobilize a very disparate group of people on the margins of both society and more \u27legitimate\u27 environmental groups
Entangling Rites: the Pattern of Experience in Cormac McCarthy\u27s All The Pretty Horses
Get PDFThe character of John Grady Cole in All The Pretty Horses marks a clear shift in McCarthy\u27s choices for characterization. McCarthy has also operated a change of landscape from southeast to southwest in both his previous novel, Blood Meridian, as well as in his personal life. Indeed, even though Blood Meridian\u27s theatre was largely built on western ground, his young hero, the never-baptized "kid," was eastern born, like McCarthy. If "the moral universe [...] remains [indeed] constant" through the shift in setting, John Grady must be acknowledged as the first genuine western hero, as he is the first to be western born and bred (McMurtry 143). His genuineness as a western male avatar is slightly challenged by his father\u27s former eastern-ness. And despite John\u27s authenticity as a westerner, it does not seem to be "the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven" as John Grady runs from Texas to find a new Eden in Mexico (All The Pretty Horses 17).
Notes on the Terror Film
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper—perhaps really more a set of somewhat informal notes, in the manner suggested by David Bordwell (28)—is to provide a broad brushstroke picture of the terror film from its beginnings, arguably coeval with cinema itself, to the present. It will be suggested that the terror film may be seen as something of the horror film\u27s repressed double, going beyond horror in terms of what it has to say about the existential realities of—to borrow Hannah Arendt\u27s term—“the human condition” in the 20th Century