1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910511312303321

Autore

Bell Robert C.

Titolo

America's disaster culture : the production of natural disasters in literature and pop culture / / Robert C. Bell and Robert M. Ficociello

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Bloomsbury Academic, , [2017]

ISBN

1-5013-9621-8

1-62892-462-4

1-62892-463-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (198 pages)

Disciplina

303.48/50973

Soggetti

Disasters in literature

Natural disasters - Social aspects - United States

Electronic books.

United States Social life and customs

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: the death of the natural disaster and the birth of disaster culture -- Trouble when the dust settles : narrative authority and Ken Burns -- Discourse disaste R: San Francisco earthquakes in 1906 and 1989 -- Natural disaster : September 11th, 2001 -- Gulf wars : the narratives of Iraq and New Orleans -- Sandy : subjectivity, celebrity, and social media -- The end of disaster capitalism : (a)bjection to (z)ombies of final disasters -- Bibliography -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

"Are we inside the era of disasters or are we merely inundated by mediated accounts of events categorized as catastrophic? America's Disaster Culture offers answers to this question and a critical theory surrounding the culture of "natural" disasters in American consumerism, literature, media, film, and popular culture. In a hyper-mediated global culture, disaster events reach us with great speed and minute detail, and Americans begin forming, interpreting, and historicizing catastrophes simultaneously with fellow citizens and people worldwide. America's Disaster Culture is not policy, management, or relief oriented. It offers an analytical framework for



the cultural production and representation of disasters, catastrophes, and apocalypses in American culture. It focuses on filling a need for critical analysis centered upon the omnipresence of real and imagined disasters, epidemics, and apocalypses in American culture. However, it also observes events, such as the Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and 9/11, that are re-framed and re-historicized as "natural" disasters by contemporary media and pop culture. Therefore, America's Disaster Culture theorizes the very parameters of classifying any event as a "natural" disaster, addresses the biases involved in a catastrophic event's public narrative, and analyzes American culture's consumption of a disastrous event. Looking toward the future, what are the hypothetical and actual threats to disaster culture? Or, are we oblivious that we are currently living in a post-apocalyptic landscape?"--Bloomsbury Publishing.