| Description |
x, 262 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Note |
Originally published: 2005. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. [233]-252) and index. |
|
Filmography: p. 239-240. |
| Contents |
Introduction : Descent and return : the katabanic imagination -- 1. Hell in our time. Is Hell a fable? -- Hell as the modern condition -- Descent and dissent in modern philosophy -- 2. Chronotopes of Hell. Generic features of katabatic narrative -- Bakhtin's Inferno : visionary versus historical chronotopes -- Unspeakable wisdom -- Conversion versus inversion -- Infernal inversion : Malcolm Lowrey's Under the volcano -- The absolute and 'my absolute' : Sarah Kofman's Smothered words -- 3. Auschwitz as Hell. Pathways through a life : The search for roots -- Black holes and the biblical Job -- A constellation of chronotopes : If this is a man -- Threshold crossing into Hell -- Auschwitz as education -- The visionary world -- On trial in Hell -- Sea-voyage and shipwreck -- The intersection of pathways -- 4. Surviving with ghosts : second generation Holocaust narratives. Bog-boys and fire children -- Vertigo and luminosity : W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz -- From depth to ascent : Anne Michaels' Fugitive pieces -- 5. Katabatic memoirs of mental illness. Down the rabbit hole -- Parallel worlds and protest culture : Susanna Kaysen's Girl, interrupted -- The schizophrenic hyperreal : Carol North's Welcome, silence -- Falling into grace : Lauren Slater's Spasm : a memoir with lies -- 6. Engendering dissent in the underworld. Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell -- Inside the hero's descent : Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills -- Hell and utopia : Marge Piercy's Woman on the edge of time -- Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The descent of Alette -- 7. Postmodern Hell and the search for roots. Karl Marx's katabasis -- Postmodern capitalist Hell : Alasdair Gray's Lanark -- Lanark's search for roots -- Can realism lead to fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? -- 8. East-West descent narratives. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse now and Western descents to the East -- Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects -- The migrations of Orpheus in five acts : Rushdie's The ground beneath her feet : Threshold crossing -- Ground zero -- Looking back -- Dismemberment -- Return of another -- Epilogue : Katabasis in the twenty-first century, September 11th : the first circle -- Afghanistan and Iraq : there and back again (again) -- Global fear and its inversions -- Appendix : Primo Levi, 'Map of reading'. |
| Subject |
Hell in literature.
|
|
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
|
| ISBN |
9780748634439 (pbk.) |
|
0748634436 (pbk.) |
|
