The wolf and literature

This thesis explores how wolves, and other animals, are represented in a variety of literary texts. At stake in these explorations is the shifting and problematic border between the human and the animal, culture and nature, civilisation and the wild. Because of its biological proximity to the domestic dog, as well as the ways in which it has been figured as both the ultimate expression of wild savagery and of maternal love, the wolf is an exemplary guide to this border. The wolf traces the ways in which the human/animal border has been constructed, sustained and transgressed. These border crossings take on a special resonance given the widespread sense of a contemporary environmental crisis. In this respect this thesis amounts to a contribution to the field of ecocriticism and pays special attention to the claim that the environmental crisis is also a 'crisis of the imagination', of our ideational and aesthetic relationship to the nonhuman world. With this in mind I look closely at some of the main currents of ecocriticism with a view to showing how certain psychoanalytic and poststructuralust approaches can enhance an overall ecocritical stance. It is an analysis which will also show how the sense of environmental emergency cannot be divorced from other critical and political concerns, including those concerns highlighted by feminist and postcolonial critics. In the words of a much favoured environmentalist slogan, 'everything connects to everything else'. Ultimately this thesis shows that how we imagine the wolf, and nature in general, in literary texts, is inextricably bound up with our relationship to, and treatment of, the natural world and the animals, including human beings, for whom that world is home

From Safe Havens to Monstrous Worlds: The 'Child' in Narratives of Environmental Collapse

Children are widely used as emotive symbols of our shared ecological future, evoking concerns for the next generation as well as the philosophical stakes and challenges of politically addressing climate change. The 'child' as redeemer anchors the dream of transforming and healing the troubled world and functions as a beacon against the foreclosure of human history. My doctoral study examines the cultural ubiquity of the child redeemer figure in contemporary Western narratives of environmental collapse. Literature and film serve as objects for a theoretical investigation that is informed by post-colonial, critical post-humanist and ecocritical conceptions of childhood, nature and narrative. Following the work of other scholars of childhood and futurity (Kathryn Bond Stockton, Jack Halberstam, Mari Ruti, Jos Esteban Muoz, Claudia Castaeda), I ask how we, as adults, might respond to children in a manner that does not reproduce the old idea of childhood innocence nor allow the adults flight of fantasy into redemption or leave the 'child' to his/her own devices. Can the 'child' exceed his/her metonymic function? What are the possibilities of delaminating the climate change story from the imperatives of a redemptive and sentimental humanism? Specifically, my project addresses the fiction of universality, which continues to thrive in the hothouse of childrens culture and education. Moving from Clio Barnards feature film The Selfish Giant (2013) to Zacharias Kunuk/Ian Mauros documentary Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2010), each of the four chapters in this dissertation is concerned with dramatizing the limits of heroic environmental storytelling modes, which tend to emphasize the individual in isolation and thereby threaten the fragile, collective, slow labor of forging a common world and a post-carbon future. Heroic reifications and fairy-tale endings may offer consolation, I propose, but they are inadequate to address the social, structural, and ecological crises we currently, and unequally, face as nations and as a species. Shifting towards collective ways of storytelling climate change, I introduce visionary, intergenerational survival stories that give imaginative form to climate grief and resistance and address the lived and heterogeneous experiences of children in a climate-impacted world

"An American Tragedy" : Strategies of Representing Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam

Celem rozprawy jest zbadanie kanonicznych narracji amerykańskich dotyczących wojny w Wietnamie pod kątem problemu wiktymizacji. Wychodzę od założenia, iż teksty te powinny być odczytywane głównie w kontekście późnych lat 70. i 80., czyli okresu, kiedy zostały one wydane oraz kiedy rozwijała się amerykańska narracja kulturowa dotycząca konfliktu. Status ofiary „Wietnamu” okazuje się być kluczowym aspektem tej kulturowej narracji, przyznanym przede wszystkim amerykańskim weteranom. Przedyskutowawszy kwestię ówczesnych dyskursów odnoszących się do wojny w Wietnamie oraz postaci weterana, a także ich ideologicznych pobudek, formułuję propozycję wedle której mitologizacja wojny wietnamskiej była niezbędna by przesłonić jej historyczność i uczynić z niej wyłącznie amerykańską sprawę. W ten sposób państwo Wietnam staje się symbolicznym krajobrazem amerykańskiego mitu, w którym rozgrywa się amerykańska tragedia. Moim celem jest dekonstrukcja różnych strategii przedstawiania Wietnamu oraz jego mieszkańców w kanonicznych narracjach, które dopuszczają się owej mitologizacji. W ostatnim rozdziale rozprawy zajmuję się przedstawieniami żołnierzy USA oraz wietnamskich cywilów, aby prześledzić strategie użyte to ustanawiania oraz wyjaśniania różnych „typów” ofiar wojny. W konkluzji zauważam, iż amerykański kanon wojny wietnamskiej w dużej mierze polega na „radzeniu sobie” z problemem zbrodni wojennej. Rozprawa odnosi się do kwestii statusu ofiary w kontekście mitu i ideologii

Into the Groove? Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction

A new and wide-ranging view of the confluence, since the 1990s, of the fields of contemporary literature and popular music in Germany

Social theory of fear: terror, torture, and death in a post-capitalist world

Fear has long served elites. They rely on fear to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites in the United States, along with other central countries, promote fear of crime and terrorism. They shaped these fears so that people looked to authorities for security, which permitted extension of apparatuses of coercion like police and military forces. In the face of growing oppression, rebellion against elite hegemony remains possible. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion

Social Theory of Fear

Fear has long served elites. They rely on fear to keep and expand their privileges and control the masses. In the current crisis of the capitalist world system, elites in the United States, along with other central countries, promote fear of crime and terrorism. They shaped these fears so that people looked to authorities for security, which permitted extension of apparatuses of coercion like police and military forces. In the face of growing oppression, rebellion against elite hegemony remains possible. This book offers an analysis of the crisis and strategies for rebellion

Promethean Desires: The Technician-Hero and Myths of Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Figures of scientists and engineers emerge during the nineteenth century as icons of masculinity distinct from either the figure of the magician or the figure of the military hero. I analyze these figures in three major works that trace an arc from myth to realism across the first half of the century. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lyric drama Prometheus Unbound, Mary Godwin Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea are the principal case studies. Additionally, I examine several other Verne novels and such texts as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and the works of Samuel Smiles, including Self-Help, Character, and The Lives of the Engineers. In these works, images of Prometheus, elemental fire and water, and the Phallus, as symbol of masculinity and male social power, express a struggle between the ideal of disembodied reason and the expression of embodied love for others. The technician-hero, whether he takes the form of a medical doctor or an engineer, such as Verne’s Captain Nemo, is chained in his body as he struggles to assume the archetypal father’s Law and control over Nature. The Promethean Complex is an extension of the Oedipal rivalry of father and son and the desire inscribed in sons to possess their father’s knowledge-power. As nineteenth-century bourgeois culture privileged a masculinity based on Logos and disciplined control over bodies and Nature, the mentality of the technician emerges as a distinct configuration. Constructed in opposition to Eros, the body, the feminine, and the unconscious, the technician ego-ideal generates a psychotic and paranoid subject, radically fragmented and unable to deal with its ultimate inability to achieve omnipotence

International Handbook of Practical Theology

A practical theology, that wants to face the complexity, plurality and differentiation of situations and contexts of religious practices from a global point of view, needs to refer to the discourses that shape them. The contributions can be divided into the sections ‘concepts of religion’, ‘religious practices’, and ‘discourses’, their aim is to identify the respective religious-cultural context and the related framework of interpretation