Infrastructures of Crisis in Global Twenty-First-Century Literature

Abstract

Examines real-world crisis narratives as represented in literary texts including nuclear disaster, the ‘refugee crisis’, global pandemics and climate change Examines the ‘crisis’ in literary criticism by examining how literary texts engage with questions around close reading Takes account of how crisis discourse is complicated and used ironically in a range of literary texts Engages with developments in scholarship on infrastructure in literary texts Uses ‘crisis’ novels to evaluate approaches to reading texts’ political interventions Discourse about crisis is pervasive in the mass media and scholarship, and in discussions about the discipline of literary studies. Contemporary narratives about crisis concern systems and infrastructures on which societies rely. This book critically engages with crises as events of excess which surpass containment efforts by governments and institutions: as occurrences that generate conflicting discourses, meanings and political responses and as entangled with visible and underlying structures. Infrastructures of Crisis concentrates on the evocation of infrastructure in literary and filmic texts about real-world events, such as nuclear accidents, the ‘refugee crisis’, pandemics and climate change, and works across scholarly conversations to examine how a range of cataclysms is figured, as well as how cultural products dramatise infrastructures’ entanglements with neoliberalism and colonialism. Show more