Journal articles by Rick Crownshaw
Textual Practice, 2017
Our new geological epoch of the Anthropocene is characterised by the primacy of humanity's catast... more Our new geological epoch of the Anthropocene is characterised by the primacy of humanity's catastrophic agency in shaping the planet and is evident in the record left behind by that agency's inscriptions in the Earth's strata. Recent literary criticism and theory, its sense of temporality and spatiality recalibrated, has sought an interpretive methodology for reading the planetary and the geological in literature. Of particular issue is scale and whether the humanist imaginaries of the literary are sufficiently multi-scalar to apprehend the unfolding Anthropocene. This essay argues that in the emphasis on scale, issues of mediation are overlooked. Turning to genre fiction, particularly that of Paulo Bacigalupi, this essay argues that its future scenarios of climate change, ecological collapse, and near-extinctiona more fully realised Anthropocenestage cultural memories of the unfolding aetiologies of the conditions imagined in the future but often subject to dissociation in our present. Conceptualising this fiction as the work of speculative memory, this essay finds in such acts of recall a self-reflexiveness as to the mediations of environmental remembrance. That is, in this futural work of cultural memory, the localisation of the planetary particularises the Anthropocene and foregrounds the ways that it is framed.
Ever since Pierre Nora's (1989: 7) paradoxical statement that '[w] e speak so much of memory beca... more Ever since Pierre Nora's (1989: 7) paradoxical statement that '[w] e speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left', memory studies, the area of inquiry Nora helped to inaugurate, has been a discourse of crisis. Emerging in the humanities in the 1980s, though with roots going
The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part o... more The essays gathered here are slightly revised versions of the position papers presented as part of the roundtable on "Memory Studies and the Anthropocene" at the MLA Convention in Philadelphia in January 2017. What sparked this roundtable is the increasing currency of the Anthropocene, on the one hand, and the observation that the field of memory studies has lately begun to grapple with its implications in earnest, on the other. The participants, all of them leading scholars in the fields of memory studies and/or the environmental humanities, had been asked to respond to the following questions: "What are the implications of the notion of the Anthropocene for memory studies? How, if at all, does the awareness of living in a new geological epoch defined by the actions of human beings affect the objects of memory, the scales of remembrance, and the field’s humanist underpinnings?"
The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from... more The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities.
Journal of American Studies, 2011
Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fict... more Literary criticism has debated the usefulness of the trauma paradigm found in much post-9/11 fiction. Where critiqued, trauma is sometimes understood as a domesticating concept by which the events of 9/11 are incorporated into sentimental, familial dramas and romances with no purchase on the international significance of the terrorist attacks and the US's response to them; or, the concept of trauma is understood critically as the means by which the boundaries of a nation or “homeland” self-perceived as violated and victimized may be shored up, rendered impermeable – if that were possible. A counterversion of trauma argues its potential as an affective means of bridging the divide between a wounded US and global suffering. Understood in this way, the concept of trauma becomes the means by which the significance of 9/11 could be deterritorialized. While these versions of trauma, found in academic theory and literary practice, invoke the spatial – the domestic sphere, the homeland, the global – they tend to focus on the time of trauma rather than on the imbrication of the temporal and the spatial. If, instead, 9/11 trauma could be more productively defined as the puncturing of national fantasies of an inviolable and innocent homeland, fantasies which themselves rest on the (failed) repression of foundational violence in the colonial and settler creation of that homeland, and on subsequent notions of American exceptionalism at home and, in the exercise of foreign policy, abroad, then the traumatic can be spatialized. In other words, understood in relation to fantasy, trauma illuminates the terroritalization and deterritorialization of American history. After working through various examples of post-9/11 fiction to demonstrate parochial renditions of trauma and trauma's unrealized global resonances, this article turns to Cormac McCarthy's 9/11 allegory The Road for the way in which its spaces, places and territories are marked by inextricable traumas of the past and present – and therefore for the way in which it models trauma's relation to national fantasy.
ABSTRACT Recent trends in Holocaust studies have addressed how forms of memorialization might tra... more ABSTRACT Recent trends in Holocaust studies have addressed how forms of memorialization might transmit a cultural memory of genocide to those who did not witness the event. In particular, the theorization of memory's transmission has attended to the traumatic ...
Calls for Papers by Rick Crownshaw
Studies in the Novel is currently seeking submissions for a special issue on "The Rising Tide of ... more Studies in the Novel is currently seeking submissions for a special issue on "The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction," guest-edited by Stef Craps (Ghent University) and Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths, University of London), which will be published in spring 2018 as part of the journal's 50th anniversary volume.
Book chapters by Rick Crownshaw
The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, 2019
The Future of Testimony, 2015
Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, 2016
Reviews by Rick Crownshaw
Books by Rick Crownshaw
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Journal articles by Rick Crownshaw
Calls for Papers by Rick Crownshaw
Book chapters by Rick Crownshaw
Reviews by Rick Crownshaw
Books by Rick Crownshaw