From Intrinsic to Radical Crisis in the United States : A Cultural Perspective

The various crises the United States went through over the first decade of the century, from the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the environmental disaster of Katrina to the financial crisis that started in 2008, remind us that America has always integrated crises in its narrative, as an o...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Jacques Pothier
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institut des Amériques 2013-10-01
Series:IdeAs
Subjects:
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/ideas/715
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The various crises the United States went through over the first decade of the century, from the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the environmental disaster of Katrina to the financial crisis that started in 2008, remind us that America has always integrated crises in its narrative, as an opportunity for demonstrating its in-bred resilience. Cormac McCarthy’s later novels suggest that the contemporary violence goes one step beyond, as it spreads beyond borders and threatens to replace a history of violence by pre-apocalyptic chaos. Literature thus points at the factors of decay that the instruments of the social sciences are not necessarily trained for.
ISSN:1950-5701