Hell in Contemporary Literature

Rachel Falconer is Professor and Chair of Modern English Literature at the University of Lausanne. Her publications include A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature, edited with Madeleine Scherer, and Hell in Contemporary Literature: Descent Narratives since 1945.

• Introduction Descent and Return: the katabatic imagination; Chapter 1 - Hell in Our Time; (i) Is Hell a fable?; (ii) Hell as the modern condition; (iii) Descent and dissent in modern philosophy; Chapter 2 - Chronotopes of Hell; (i) Generic features of katabatic narrative; (ii) Bakhtin's Inferno: visionary versus historical chronotopes; (iii) Unspeakable wisdom; (iv) Conversion versus inversion; (v) Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano; (vi) The absolute and 'my absolute': Sarah Kofman's Smothered Words; Chapter 3 - Auschwitz as Hell; (i) Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots; (ii) Black Holes and the biblical Job; (iii) A constellation of chronotopes: If This is a Man; (a) Threshold crossing into Hell; (b) Auschwitz as education; (c) The visionary world; (d) On trial in Hell; (e) Sea-voyage and shipwreck; (iv) The intersection of pathways; Chapter 4 - Surviving with Ghosts: Second Generation Holocaust Narratives; (i) Bog-boys and fire-children; (ii) Vertigo and luminosity: W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz; (iii) From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces; Chapter 5 - Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness; (i) Down the rabbit hole; (ii) Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted; (iii) The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North's Welcome, Silence,/i>; (iv) Falling into grace: Lauren Slater's Spasm: A Memoir with Lies; Chapter 6 - Engendering Dissent in the Underworld; (i) Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell; (ii) Inside the hero's descent: Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills; (iii) Hell and utopia: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time; (iv) Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette; Chapter 7 - Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots; (i) Karl Marx's katabasis; (ii) Postmodern capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray's Lanark; (iii) Lanark's search for roots; (iv) Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism?; Chapter 8 - East-West Descent Narratives; (i) Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East; (ii) Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects; (iii) The migrations of Orpheus, in five acts: Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet; (a) Threshold crossing; (b) Ground Zero; (c) Looking back; (d) Dismemberment; (e) Return of another; Epilogue - Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century; (i) September 11th: the first circle; (ii) Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again); (iii) Global fear and its inversions; Appendix: Primo Levi, 'Map of reading'; Bibliography; Index.

Select Guide Rating