Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature

Author:   Brett Josef Grubisic ,  Gisèle M. Baxter ,  Tara Lee
Publisher:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
ISBN:  

9781554589890


Pages:   450
Publication Date:   30 May 2014
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature


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Overview

What do literary dystopias reflect about the times? In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, contributors address this amorphous but pervasive genre, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is conveyed or portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility. Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and the work of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson (to name a few), this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilities - ends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizations - have become central to public discourseover the same period. By asking questions such as """"What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?"""" and """"What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?"""" Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase serves to resituate dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduce a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.

Full Product Details

Author:   Brett Josef Grubisic ,  Gisèle M. Baxter ,  Tara Lee
Publisher:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Imprint:   Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.50cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.740kg
ISBN:  

9781554589890


ISBN 10:   1554589894
Pages:   450
Publication Date:   30 May 2014
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

"Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature, edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee Introduction Brett Josef Grubisic, Giséle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee PART I Altered States The Man in the Klein Blue Suit: Searching for Agency in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy Janine Tobeck The Cultural Logic of Post-Capitalism: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Popular Dystopia Carl F. l. Miller Logical Gaps and Capitalism's Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl Sharlee Reimer """"The Dystopia of the Obsolete"""": Lisa Robertson's Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia Paul Stephens Post-Frontier and Re-Definition of Space in Tropic of Orange Hande Tekdemir Our Posthuman Adolescence: Dystopia, Information Technologies, and the Construction of Subjectivity in M.T. Anderson's Feed Richard Gooding PART II Plastic Subjectivities Woman Gave Names to All the Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia in Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction Annette Lapointe The End of Life as We Knew It: Material Nature and the American Family in Susan Beth Pfeffer's Last Survivors Series Alexa Weik von Mossner """"The Treatment for Stirrings"""": Dystopian Literature for Adolescents Joseph Campbell Imagining Black Bodies in the Future Gregory Hampton Brown Girl in the Ring as Urban Policy Sharon DeGraw PART III Spectral Histories Archive Failure? Cielos de la Tierra's Historical Dystopia Zac Zimmer Love, War, and Mal de Amores: Utopia and Dystopia in the Mexican Revolution María Odette Canivell Culture of Control/Control of Culture: Anne Legault's Récits de Médilhault Lee Skallerup Bessette The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse Robert McGill Neoliberalism and Dystopia in U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Fiction Lysa Rivera America and Books are """"Never Going to Die"""": Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as a New York Jewish """"Ustopia"""" Marleen S. Barr In Pursuit of an Outside: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers and the Crisis of the Unrepresentable Thomas Stubblefield Homero Aridjis and Mexico's Eco-Critical Dystopia Adam Spires PART IV Emancipating Genres Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman's American Gods Robert Tally Which Way is Hope? Dystopia into the (Mexican) Borgian Labyrinth Luis Gómez Romero Dystopia Now: Examining the Rach(a)els in Automaton Biographies and Player One Kit Dobson The Romance of the Blazing World: Looking back from CanLit to SF Owen Percy """"It's not power, it's sex"""": Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook and Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn Helene Staveley Another Novel is Possible: Muckraking in Chris Bachelder's U.S.! and Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World Lee Konstantinou About the Contributors"

Reviews

Not only does it have the coolest title, but Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase is also among the best-edited volumes on SF published last year ... As a study of North American texts, it addresses the continent's tri-lingual colonial heritage, including five essays on Spanish-language and two on French-language texts. Reasonably priced for its heft, rigorous in its approach, this volume offers an extended interrogation of how contemporary writers extrapolate the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, the ongoing vicissitudes of European colonization of the Americas, and the dehumanizing aspects of global capitalism. At the same time, it covers a staggering array of texts and writers; above all, like NAFTA itself, it seeks to erase the national borders that all too often artificially compartmentalize literary studies, ultimately decentring the US by forcing readers to rethink the equation US = America.--Amy J. Ransom SFRA Review


Author Information

Brett Josef Grubisic teaches contemporary literature at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of Understanding Beryl Bainbridge as well as the novel The Age of Cities. He is the co-author (with David L. Chapman) of American Hunks: The Muscular Male Body in Popular Culture, 1860-1970 and co-editor (with Andrea Cabajsky) of National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada (WLU Press, 2010). Gisèle M. Baxter has taught in the English Department at the University of British Columbia since 1997. Her research interests include near-future dystopias, the Gothic inheritance, children's/YA literature, and British modernism. Her publications, talks, and media work address topics such as Spanish Civil War narratives, vampires, zombies, Internet culture, women in music, and Peter Pan. She is writing a novel. Tara Lee teaches in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her teaching and research interests include media and technology, science fiction, critical race theory, and contemporary minority Canadian literature. She also works as a freelance writer and broadcaster for a variety of local and national publications.

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