What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? This book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or...
more
Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Sachsen-Anhalt / Zentrale
Inter-library loan:
No inter-library loan
What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? This book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering 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'
