"Surviving" adolescence : apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic transformations in young adult fiction

This study, entitled "Surviving" Adolescence: Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic transformations in young adult fiction‖, analyses how discourses surrounding the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic are represented in selected young adult fiction published between 1997 and 2009. The term ―apocalypse‖ is used by current theorists to refer to an uncovering or disclosure (most often a truth), and ―post-apocalypse‖ means to be after a disclosure, after a revelation, or after catastrophe. This study offers a double reading of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic discourses, and the dialectical tensions that are inherent in, and arise from, these discourses. Drawing on the current scholarship of children‘s and young adult literature this thesis uses post-structural theoretical perspectives to develop a framework and methodology for conducting a close textual analysis of exclusion, ‗un‘differentiation, prophecy, and simulacra of death. The combined theoretical perspectives and methodology offer new contributions to young adult fiction scholarship. This thesis finds that rather than conceiving adolescence as the endurance of a passing phase of a young person‘s life, there is a new trend emerging in young adult fiction that treats adolescence as a space of transformation essential to the survival of the young adult, and his/her community.

L'exploration de la ruine post-apocalyptique vidéoludique comme créatrice de mémoire et d'émotions

Pour respecter les droits d’auteur, la version électronique de ce mémoire a été dépouillée de certains documents visuels et audio‐visuels. La version intégrale du mémoire a été déposée à la Division de la gestion des documents et des archives.

La singularidad del proyecto poético de Sergio Chejfec : Análisis de Mis dos mundos

En After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger (1999) estudia el posapocalipsis en Estados Unidos. Explica que cada tentativa de representar lo irrepresentable es incompleta por definición porque siempre deja residuos. Otra paradoja que plantea es que cuesta menos recordar un evento traumático en sí que captar aquello que ocurre después, sus efectos posteriores sobre un individuo o una colectividad, la presencia dolorosa de lo fantasmático. En su narrativa, Sergio Chejfec evoca este mundo en ruinas de la memoria heredada (postmemory según Marianne Hirsch), tanto en cuanto a su configuración espacial como en cuanto a sus pautas de sociabilidad. El proyecto poético formulado por Chejfec supone un desplazamiento en la novelística argentina posterior a la fase posdictatorial "alegórica" (Idelber Avelar en Alegorías de la derrota, 2000). En Mis dos mundos (2008), Chejfec relata una excursión por un parque urbano del sur de Brasil. La caminata emprendida por el protagonista, a punto de convertirse en cincuentón, le permite reflexionar acerca del legado de algunos antecesores, evocado a través de intertextos como los Cumpleaños de Fuentes y de Aira, y acerca de las aporías de la tradición literaria en general. A pesar de las afinidades adornianas que se perciben en Chejfec, se observa en este texto una impugnación a la categoría de obra de arte como forma autónoma y distanciada de lo real. El análisis de Mis dos mundos que nos proponemos llevar a cabo constituirá el punto de partida para una tentativa de definición de los "atributos" de esta literatura

La singularidad del proyecto poético de Sergio Chejfec : Análisis de Mis dos mundos

En After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger (1999) estudia el posapocalipsis en Estados Unidos. Explica que cada tentativa de representar lo irrepresentable es incompleta por definición porque siempre deja residuos. Otra paradoja que plantea es que cuesta menos recordar un evento traumático en sí que captar aquello que ocurre después, sus efectos posteriores sobre un individuo o una colectividad, la presencia dolorosa de lo fantasmático. En su narrativa, Sergio Chejfec evoca este mundo en ruinas de la memoria heredada (postmemory según Marianne Hirsch), tanto en cuanto a su configuración espacial como en cuanto a sus pautas de sociabilidad. El proyecto poético formulado por Chejfec supone un desplazamiento en la novelística argentina posterior a la fase posdictatorial "alegórica" (Idelber Avelar en Alegorías de la derrota, 2000). En Mis dos mundos (2008), Chejfec relata una excursión por un parque urbano del sur de Brasil. La caminata emprendida por el protagonista, a punto de convertirse en cincuentón, le permite reflexionar acerca del legado de algunos antecesores, evocado a través de intertextos como los Cumpleaños de Fuentes y de Aira, y acerca de las aporías de la tradición literaria en general. A pesar de las afinidades adornianas que se perciben en Chejfec, se observa en este texto una impugnación a la categoría de obra de arte como forma autónoma y distanciada de lo real. El análisis de Mis dos mundos que nos proponemos llevar a cabo constituirá el punto de partida para una tentativa de definición de los "atributos" de esta literatura

La singularidad del proyecto poético de Sergio Chejfec : Análisis de Mis dos mundos

En After the End. Representations of Post-Apocalypse, James Berger (1999) estudia el posapocalipsis en Estados Unidos. Explica que cada tentativa de representar lo irrepresentable es incompleta por definición porque siempre deja residuos. Otra paradoja que plantea es que cuesta menos recordar un evento traumático en sí que captar aquello que ocurre después, sus efectos posteriores sobre un individuo o una colectividad, la presencia dolorosa de lo fantasmático. En su narrativa, Sergio Chejfec evoca este mundo en ruinas de la memoria heredada (postmemory según Marianne Hirsch), tanto en cuanto a su configuración espacial como en cuanto a sus pautas de sociabilidad. El proyecto poético formulado por Chejfec supone un desplazamiento en la novelística argentina posterior a la fase posdictatorial "alegórica" (Idelber Avelar en Alegorías de la derrota, 2000). En Mis dos mundos (2008), Chejfec relata una excursión por un parque urbano del sur de Brasil. La caminata emprendida por el protagonista, a punto de convertirse en cincuentón, le permite reflexionar acerca del legado de algunos antecesores, evocado a través de intertextos como los Cumpleaños de Fuentes y de Aira, y acerca de las aporías de la tradición literaria en general. A pesar de las afinidades adornianas que se perciben en Chejfec, se observa en este texto una impugnación a la categoría de obra de arte como forma autónoma y distanciada de lo real. El análisis de Mis dos mundos que nos proponemos llevar a cabo constituirá el punto de partida para una tentativa de definición de los "atributos" de esta literatura

"The post-antibiotic apocalypse" and the "war on superbugs": catastrophe discourse in microbiology, its rhetorical form and political function

Discourses evoking an antibiotic apocalypse and a war on superbugs are emerging just at a time when so-called "catastrophe discourses" are undergoing critical and reflexive scrutiny in the context of global warming and climate change. This article combines insights from social science research into climate change discourses with applied metaphor research based on recent advances in cognitive linguistics, especially with relation to "discourse metaphors." It traces the emergence of a new apocalyptic discourse in microbiology and health care, examines its rhetorical and political function and discusses its advantages and disadvantages. It contains a reply by the author of the central discourse metaphor, "the post-antibiotic apocalypse," examined in the article.

Architecture post mortem : the diastolic architecture of decline, dystopia, and death

Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an “Alamo” of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher. Contents: Introduction: ‘the way things are’, Donald Kunze; Driven into the public: the psychic constitution of space, Todd McGowan; Dead or alive in Joburg, Simone Brott; Building in-between the two deaths: a post mortem manifesto, Nadir Lahiji; Kant, Sade, ethics and architecture, David Bertolini; Post mortem: building deconstruction, Kazi K. Ashraf; The slow-fast architecture of love in the ruins, Donald Kunze; Progress: re-building the ruins of architecture, Gevork Hartoonian; Adrian Stokes: surface suicide, Peggy Deamer; A window to the soul: depth in the early modern section drawing, Paul Emmons; Preliminary thoughts on Piranesi and Vico, Erika Naginski; architectural asceticism and austerity, Didem Ekici; 900 miles to Paradise, and other afterlives of architecture, Dennis Maher; Index.

Unnoticed apocalypse: the science fiction politics of urban crisis

The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?

Apocalyptic Discourse in Contemporary Culture: Post-Millennial Perspectives of the End of the World

This interdisciplinary collection of essays focuses on critical and theoretical responses to the apocalypse of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cultural production. Examining the ways in which apocalyptic discourses have had an impact on how we read the world’s globalised space, the traumatic burden of history, and the mutual relationship between language and eschatological belief, fifteen original essays by a group of internationally established and emerging critics reflect on the apocalypse, its past tradition, pervasive present and future legacy. The collection seeks to offer a new reading of the apocalypse, understood as a complex – and, frequently, paradoxical – paradigm of (contemporary) Western culture. The majority of published collections on the subject have been published prior to the year 2000 and, in their majority of cases, locate the apocalypse in the future and envision it as something imminent. This collection offers a post-millennial perspective that perceives "the end" as immanent and, simultaneously, rooted in the past tradition.

The Coming of Post-reflexive Society: Commodification and Language in Digital Capitalism

Language is a unique aspect of human communication because it can be used to discuss itself in its own terms. For this reason, human societies potentially have superior capacities of co-ordination, reflexive self-correction, and innovation than other animal, physical or cybernetic systems. However, this analysis also reveals that language is interconnected with the economically and technologically mediated social sphere and hence is vulnerable to abstraction, objectification, reification, and therefore ideology – all of which are antithetical to its reflexive function, whilst paradoxically being a fundamental part of it. In particular, in capitalism, language is increasingly commodified within the social domains created and affected by ubiquitous communication technologies. The advent of the so-called ‘knowledge economy’ implicates exchangeable forms of thought (language) as the fundamental commodities of this emerging system. The historical point at which a ‘knowledge economy’ emerges, then, is the critical point at which thought itself becomes a commodified ‘thing’, and language becomes its “objective” means of exchange. However, the processes by which such commodification and objectification occurs obscures the unique social relations within which these language commodities are produced. The latest economic phase of capitalism – the knowledge economy – and the obfuscating trajectory which accompanies it, we argue, is destroying the reflexive capacity of language particularly through the process of commodification. This can be seen in that the language practices that have emerged in conjunction with digital technologies are increasingly non-reflexive and therefore less capable of self-critical, conscious change.