Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty'Risk Criticism: Reading in an Age of Manufactured Uncertainties' is a study of literary and cultural responses to global environmental risk that offers an environmental humanities approach to understanding risk in an age of unfolding ecological catastrophe. In 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists re-set its iconic Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight, as close to the apocalypse as it has been since 1953. What pushed its hands was, however, not just the threat of nuclear weapons, but also other global environmental risks that the Bulletin judged to have risen to the scale of the nuclear, including climate change and innovations in the life sciences. If we may once have believed that the end of days would come in a blaze of nuclear firestorm (or the chill of the subsequent nuclear winter), we now suspect that the apocalypse may be much slower, creeping in as chemical toxin, climate change, or bio- or nano- technologies run amok. Taking inspiration from the questions raised by the Bulletin’s synecdochical “nuclear,” 'Risk Criticism' aims to generate a hybrid form of critical practice that brings “nuclear criticism”&#٬٢٠١٤؛a subfield of literary studies that has been, since the Cold War, largely neglected—into conversation with ecocriticism, the more recent approach to environmental texts in literary studies. Through readings of novels, films, theater, poetry, visual art, websites, news reports, and essays, 'Risk Criticism' tracks the diverse ways in which environmental risks are understood and represented today. |
Contents
Will the Apocalypse Have Been Now? Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk | 1 |
Archival Reflexions | 28 |
Two We All Live in Bhopal? Staging Global Risk | 64 |
Analogy and Biotechnology | 93 |
Four Letting Plastic Have Its Say or Plastics Tell | 123 |
Five The Port Radium Paradigm or Fukushima in a Changing Climate | 154 |
Writing The Bomb Inheritances in the Anthropocene | 192 |
Notes | 209 |
| 239 | |
| 255 | |
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Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty Molly Wallace No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
activists analogy Animal’s anthropomorphism apocalypse archive atomic age Atomic Scientists ball Beck’s Bikini biotech Buell Bulletin Burning Vision cancer Cat’s Cradle catastrophe characters chemical Chernobyl clearly climate change Clock Cold War context course Creation critique cultural dangers DeLillo’s Déline Dene Derrida disaster Doomsday Doomsday Clock ecocriticism ecological effects environmental explosion Fermi fiction film Fukushima future genetic engineering genetically modified foods global risk GMOs hazard Hiroshima human Ibid ice-nine imagined irony Kampani kind Latour Lawrence Buell literary live in Bhopal Marukis Matacão metaphor Millet’s Monsanto murals narrative nature novel nuclear criticism offers Ozeki’s pesticides plant plastic political Port Radium potential precautionary present Press problem produced Radiant Heart radiation render responsibility risk criticism risk society second nuclear age seeds seems Sinha slow violence staging story suggests synecdoche Szilard texts thing tion Toshi turn Ulrich Beck uranium Vonnegut’s wager waste White Noise World at Risk world risk society Wyck