Description
Book SynopsisWhat does it mean when people use the word ''Hell'' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience?Now available in paperback, 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. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola''s Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and
Table of ContentsIntroduction Descent and Return: the katabatic imagination; Chapter 1 - Hell in Our Time; (i) Is Hell a fable?; (ii) Hell as the modern condition; (iii) Descent and dissent in modern philosophy; Chapter 2 - Chronotopes of Hell; (i) Generic features of katabatic narrative; (ii) Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes; (iii) Unspeakable wisdom; (iv) Conversion versus inversion; (v) Katabatic inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano; (vi) The absolute and my absolute: Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words; Chapter 3 - Auschwitz as Hell; (i) Pathways through a life: Primo Levi's The Search for Roots; (ii) Black Holes and the Book of Job; (iii) A constellation of chronotopes: If This is a Man; (a) Threshold crossing into Hell; (b) Auschwitz as education; (c) The visionary world; (d) On trial in Hell; (e) Sea-voyage and shipwreck; (iv) The intersection of pathways; Chapter 4 - Surviving with Ghosts: Second Generation Holocaust Narratives; (i) Bog-boys and fire-children; (ii) Vertigo and luminosity: W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; (iii) From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces;; Chapter 5 - Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness; (i) Down the rabbit hole; (ii) Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted; (iii) The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome Silence; (iv) Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm, A Memoir with Lies; Chapter 6 - Engendering Dissent in the Underworld; (i) Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell; (ii) Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills; (iii) Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time; (iv) Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette; Chapter 7 - Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots; (i) Karl Marx's katabasis; (ii) Postmodern capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark; (iii) Lanark's search for roots; (iv) Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism?; Chapter 8 - East-West Descent Narratives; (i) Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East; (ii) Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects; (iii) The migrations of Orpheus, in five acts: Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet; (a) Threshold crossing; (b) Ground Zero; (c) Looking back; (d) Dismemberment; (e) Return of another; Epilogue - Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century; (i) 9/11: the first circle; (ii) Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again); (iii) Global fear and its inversions; Appendix - Primo Levi, 'Map of reading'; Bibliography; Index.
