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William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition (review)
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Lurie, Peter |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | fantasies of the establishment of conservative gender roles during post-disaster reconstruction. However, nuclear anxiety literature tends to be more politically interesting because it must engage, and cannot resolve, the contradictions of contemporary nuclear policies in daily life. As a topic of critical concern, nuclear suspense also remains relevant because it did not disappear with the Cold War but is reworked in retrospective literary accounts of that period as well as in recent stories about the environment, nuclear energy, and terrorism. This changing state of suspense is a mode of "being poised before alternative futures" (151). While occasionally directly exploring how literature addresses the question of what such alternative futures might look like, beyond the unfolding of nuclear disaster, Cordle primarily suggests that fiction writers could not imagine any kind of satisfactory end to nuclear anxiety. Indeed, he situates readers within this persistent suspense in the last line of the book: "Our world is still an atomic one" (152). Tracing the particular narrative practices that reflect and produce anxiety about the threat of nuclear war in US literature from 1945 to 2005, States of Suspense demonstrates that literary histories of engagement with nuclear weapons involve not only imaginations of destroyed states of life but also expressions of prolonged, suspended temporalities of waiting for destruction. In unfolding these anxious imaginations, States of Suspense provides often unexpected, littlerecognized perspectives on the nuclear weapons that still imperil life today. |
| Starting Page | 766 |
| Ending Page | 770 |
| Page Count | 5 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1353/mfs.2011.0077 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=english-faculty-publications |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0077 |
| Volume Number | 57 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
