In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. Yet hope is continually sought and proclaimed
In narratives of literature and cultural production, hope and despair remain fundamental in exploring our world. In recent years, political polarization, the Covid pandemic, global warming, and new and ongoing wars have contributed to global crises, to which despair is an understandable response. Yet hope is continually sought and proclaimed. By examining tropes of ruin and regeneration in a wide selection of narratives including memoir, graphic narratives, fiction, film, art, radio plays, culture, rhetoric, and discourse, the book uncovers resonances between them. The anthology moves from the personal to the collective, addressing individual matters of the body and the mind, societal visions of utopia and dystopia, and finally, hope and despair for the earth itself in representations of apocalypse and the Anthropocene. This structure, alongside the interdisciplinary nature of the project, maps dynamic international perspectives in which hope and despair flow across and through personal, social, and earthly concerns.
Recenzijas
Narratives of Hope and Despair: Ruin and Regeneration in Literature and Culture brings together a rich and diverse collection of voices from across the global scholarly community to explore the various and varied ways in which narrative produces and is produced by the lived, felt experiences of hope and despair. The thirteen chapters that comprise the body of this volume engage myriad genresfrom the novel to the graphic novel to film to the radio play to memoir and autobiography, to name only a fewin the quest to rigorously interrogate and thoughtfully articulate how we create and handle hope and despair, ruin and rejuvenation, in narratives of critical moments and times. The result is a meticulously researched, highly original, and compelling volume that will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of academics who represent many fields from across the arts and humanities.
Heath A. Diehl, Teaching Professor, Bowling Green State University, USA
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Johanna M. Wagner, Melanie Duckworth, Deanna Benjamin
I Individual Matters: Body and Mind
1 Common but not normal: The Narrative of Illness in Duermo mucho [ I Sleep
a Lot], by Maria Manonelles Ribes
Wladimir Chįvez
2 Hope and Despair in the Grey Zone: Unlikely Solidarities and Friendships in
Negotiating Prolonged Incarceration in Sri Lankas Political Prisons
Vihanga Perera
3 Spacetime, Tone, and the Sublime: Hope and Despair in Djuna Barnes
Nightwood
Johanna M. Wagner
4 Pessimistic Hope as Rebellion: Fassbinders Despair and Utopia
Anna Bell
II Societal Matters: Utopian and Dystopian Impulses
5 Trauma Memoir as Dystopian Literature
Deanna Benjamin
6 Climbing Mt. Holyoke: Emily Dickinson, Mary Lyon, and Woman-Centered
Utopias
Aliki Barnstone
7 Falling Out of the Story: Asian American Archives, Cruel Optimism, and
Emancipatory Apparatuses in Sally Wen Maos Oculus and Charles Yus Interior
Chinatown
Paul Petrovic
8 End. Begin. All the same: The Ends (And Beginnings) of Worlds in
Netflixs The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
Miranda Liebel
9 At the End of History: Art Practices in Times and Spaces of Modern
Ruination
Dimitra Gkitsa
III Earthly Matters: Apocalypse and the Anthropocene
10 Norwegian Futurisms: Energy Transitions in Young Adult Ecodystopian
Fiction
Karl Kristian Swane Bambini
11 Animal Voices in the Apocalypse: The Animals in That Country and The Ghost
of the Cock
Melanie Duckworth
12 The Ruins of Holocene: Notes on Climate Change and the Rise of Disaster
Liberalism
Iason Zarikos
13 Optimistic vs Ominous: Competing Rhetorics of Ecological Crisis
John Farnsworth
Index
Johanna M. Wagner is Professor of English at Ųstfold University College in Norway. She publishes in American and British literature, womens literature, Modernism, and film. Her theoretical interests lie at the intersections of gender/sexuality, feminism, affect, critical race theory, and metaphysics. Her last co-edited project was Women and Fairness (2021).
Melanie Duckworth is an associate professor of English Literature at Ųstfold University College, Norway. She publishes in the fields of childrens literature, Australian literature, and ecocriticism. Her most recent co-edited volume is Storying Plants in Australian Childrens and Young Adult Literature: Roots and Winged Seeds (2023).
Deanna Benjamin teaches college and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, USA. Her creative work is forthcoming in The Texas Review and has appeared in Brevity, Flash Boulevard, and other venues. Her critical essay, Writing Someone Elses Story appears in Women and Fairness (2021).
