ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER

The Anticipation of Catastrophe

THE ANTICIPATION OF CATASTROPHE
Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture

Edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner 

Universitätsverlag Winter 2014

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Since the 1980s, “risk” has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity.

The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture – Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner

PART I Fictionalizing Global Climate Change

  • Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation – Sylvia Mayer
  • Risk, Denial and Narrative Form in Climate Change Fiction: Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Ilija Trojanow’s Melting Ice – Axel Goodbody
  • Things We Didn’t See Coming – Riskscapes in Climate Change Fiction – Antonia Mehnert

II Representations of Nuclear Risk

  • “These Rays May Be Helpful or Harmful”: The Depiction of Radium in Early 20th Century American Newspapers – Holger Kersten
  • The Stuff of Fear: Emotion, Ethics, and the Materiality of Nuclear Risk in Silkwood and The China Syndrome – Alexa Weik von Mossner
  • Nuclear Risk, Domestic Responsibility, and the Uses of Comedy: Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady – Anna Thiemann

III Environmental Risks Across Media

  • Beyond Climate Refugees: Nature, Risk and Migration in American Poetry – Christine Gerhardt
  • A Sense of an Ending – Risk, Catastrophe and Precarious Humanity in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – Karin Höpker
  • “It’s theoretically possible”: Disaster and Risk in Contemporary American Film – Nicole Maruo-Schröder
  • Green Gaming: Video Games and Environmental Risk – Colin Milburn

ACADEMIC REVIEWS

Bergthaller, Hannes. 2017. Review The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Anglia 135 (4): 768-71.

Leikam, Susanne. 2016. Review The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Amerikastudien/American Studies 61 (4).

Durczak, Johanna. 2015. Review The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture, edited by Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner. Polish Journal for American Studies 9: 196-199.