TY - BOOK AU - Falconer, Rachel TI - Hell in contemporary literature: Western descent narrative since 1945 SN - 9780748634439 U1 - 809.93382 PY - 2007/// CY - Edinburgh PB - Edinburgh University Press Ltd. N1 - Includes bibliography and index; Introduction: Descent and Return - the katabatic imagination 1 Hell in Our Time Is Hell a fable? Hell as the modern condition Descent and dissent in modern philosophy 2 Chronotopes of Hell Generic features of katabatic narrative Bakhtin’s Inferno-, visionary versus historical chronotopes Unspeakable wisdom Conversion versus inversion Infernal inversion: Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano The absolute and ’my absolute’: Sarah Kofman’s Smothered Words 3 Auschwitz as Hell Pathways through a life: The Search for Roots Black holes and the biblical Job A constellation of chronotopes: If This Is a Man Threshold crossing into Hell Auschwitz as education The visionary world On trial in Hell Sea-voyage and shipwreck The intersection of pathways 4 Surviving with Ghosts: Second-generation Holocaust Narratives Bog-boys and fire-children Vertigo and luminosity: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz From depth to ascent: Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces 5 Katabatic Memoirs of Mental Illness Down the rabbit hole Parallel worlds and protest culture: Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted The schizophrenic HyperReal: Carol North’s Welcome, Silence Falling into grace: Lauren Slater’s Spasm: A Memoir with Lies 6 Engendering Dissent in the Underworld Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell Inside the hero’s descent: Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills Hell and Utopia: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time Dante upside-down: Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette 7 Postmodern Hell and the Search for Roots Karl Marx’s katabasis Postmodern Capitalist Hell: Alasdair Gray’s Lanark Lanark’s search for roots Can realism lead fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism? 8 East-West Descent Narratives Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Western descents to the East Salman Rushdie’s disoriented subjects The migrations of Orpheus in five acts: Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet Threshold crossing Ground Zero Looking back Dismemberment Return of another Epilogue: Katabasis in the Twenty-First Century September 11th: the first circle Afghanistan and Iraq: there and back again (again) Global fear and its inversions ER -