The Poetics of Disaster

Disaster Theory, 2016

In her book The Culture of Disaster, Marie-Hélène Huet approaches disaster not as a fundamental rupture but as the premise of modern thought. She argues that the state of emergency that characterizes current Western culture has its origins in the anxiety about catastrophic events. Designating destruction, despair and chaos resulting from distant power of cosmic agencies, the word disaster is directly related to disorders of uncommon magnitude. According to James Berger, apocalypse and trauma are congruent ideas, but there is a temporal difference: apocalypse is preceded by signs and portents, while trauma produces symptoms after the event. In both cases it is a shattering experience, fundamentally unread-able, ungraspable, unthinkable, overwhelming limit event—a disaster. Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Diaster is a book about living in a world without a star to guide us and without redemption. In his view, disaster is a break with the star, break with every form of totality, utter collapse of every possibility of experience. As such, it is the limit of writing. The question is, how are we to write, engage, and critically come to terms with the problematic of disaster? How is disaster seen and unseen, remembered and unrrememebered? What kind of violence lies behind it? What does it mean to be touched by disaster? This essay aims to examine the concept of disaster in relation to present debates about trauma and apocalypse and thereby address the problem of politics of writing (of the disaster). " When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary). " (Blanchot 1995a: 33)

international journal of chemical sciences, 2016

This paper tries to relate disaster and literature. The authors have tried to classify the different types of disasters and study disaster as reflected in literature from the time of Homer. One types of disaster in particular, Shipwreck has been taken for analysis. The authors have tried to co-relate man, culture and disaster, the role of disaster in literature, the impact on individual and society and adaptation of human beings post disaster through selected literary works.

isara solutions, 2016

Human beings face disasters from their genesis, scientists, geologists in their research findings stated that earth: the abode of human being is itself formed due to the cosmic disaster. So human being cannot run away from disasters. Disaster causes extensive damage to life and property. It is classified as manmade disaster and natural disaster. Some disasters are unavoidable but the intensity of the losses caused by disasters can be reduced by increasing awareness, preparedness and effective management. English literary works are full of accounts of different kinds of disasters like floods, fires, storms, shipwrecks, and earthquakes. The present paper is an attempt to portray how English literary artists have portrayed disasters in their works and how literature can provide a ray of hope to the disaster affected human beings.

Manchester University Press eBooks, 2009

ADSRzine, 2023

If you asked me what was my art highlight of 2022, I would have to say it was attending the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference 2022, presented in conjunction with AFAC22, the largest international conference of emergency services personnel in Australasia, held in Adelaide last August. The conference itself was a vast exhibition on the model and scale of an international trade fair: a showroom floor crowded with displays of the latest emergency services technologies from fire trucks to drone systems. Some of these exhibitions would rival the most sophisticated objects of contemporary art, as much for the startling display of formal coherence as for the inscrutability of the logics of its functioning.

2021

Respected Sir/Madam, Sharing with you the Flyer/Banner of the forthcoming International Webinar on “Imagining Catastrophe: Literary and Cultural Representations of Environmental Disaster” to be organized by the Department of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, Jhargram, West Bengal, India, on 22 October (Friday) @ 8:30 AM (IST), 23 October (Saturday) @ 3:30 PM & 24 October (Sunday) 2021 @ 3:30 PM. Google Meet joining link: https://meet.google.com/htt-huep-koj

Critical Disaster Studies, 2021

Susan Scott Parrish posits the novel as a genre uniquely capable of communicating the inherently social and complex risks of disaster. Focusing on London’s bubonic plague of 1665 and Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi in 2005, she argues that unlike the official and scientific assessments they complement, novels help readers to understand how disaster feels.

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2015