Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee

Apocalyptic Futures: Marked Bodies and the Violence of the Text in Kafka, Conrad, and Coetzee

Samolsky, Russell

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0823234797
ISBN13: 9780823234790
Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
Published: Sep 29 2011
Pages: 252
Weight: 1.00
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In this book, the author argues that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, he examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event into its future reception. He is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions.

Apocalyptic Futures also sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment. Deploying the double register of marks to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the author focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman.

Situating In the Penal Colony in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, the author argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works' apocalyptic futures in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

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