Sara Upstone
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719078323
- eISBN:
- 9781781703229
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719078323.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear. Written and produced by Adam Curtis, the documentary controversially argues that Islamist ...
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In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear. Written and produced by Adam Curtis, the documentary controversially argues that Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda are self-realising myths, encouraged by the West (particularly U.S. neoconservatives) in order to construct identifiable enemies resonant with the popular imagination. Curtis does not deny the reality of terrorism; what he denies is a well-coordinated and hidden organisation as the source of this threat. Like Curtis, Hari Kunzru sees an explicit connection between terrorism and selfhood. This chapter examines Kunzru's works, Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007), in which he suggests that individuals with justifiable motives find themselves co-opted into less-ethical schemes with a group mentality which strips them of their individual subjectivity, whether such groups are imaginary (in the case of Transmission) or real (as in My Revolutions). Group identity supersedes the complexity of individual selfhood. The chapter also looks at the politics of selfhood and consciousness, as well as identity versus self.Less
In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear. Written and produced by Adam Curtis, the documentary controversially argues that Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda are self-realising myths, encouraged by the West (particularly U.S. neoconservatives) in order to construct identifiable enemies resonant with the popular imagination. Curtis does not deny the reality of terrorism; what he denies is a well-coordinated and hidden organisation as the source of this threat. Like Curtis, Hari Kunzru sees an explicit connection between terrorism and selfhood. This chapter examines Kunzru's works, Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007), in which he suggests that individuals with justifiable motives find themselves co-opted into less-ethical schemes with a group mentality which strips them of their individual subjectivity, whether such groups are imaginary (in the case of Transmission) or real (as in My Revolutions). Group identity supersedes the complexity of individual selfhood. The chapter also looks at the politics of selfhood and consciousness, as well as identity versus self.
Lisa Nanney
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781942954873
- eISBN:
- 9781789629781
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781942954873.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most ...
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In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most important of the “Lost Generation” writers for his innovative modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. But by 1938 he had cut ties with leftist organizations in the U.S., begun publishing in anti-Communist journals, become estranged from leftist friends such as Hemingway and playwright John Howard Lawson, and was ostracized by leftist critics for expressing his conviction that Communism was the paramount threat to individual liberties and democracy. Thereafter, his books were often criticized as ideologically doctrinaire, their style as falling far short of his earlier achievements, which had adapted into dynamic narrative the visual devices of cinema. John Dos Passos and Cinema explores these political and critical transitions through the lens of the writer’s little-known work, much of it archival, in the medium of film itself. As a novelist, he had used film as a subject and stylistic source; as screen writer, he evolved his methods directly from the cinema’s visual language, demonstrating how potently the medium could be manipulated for political and commercial profit.Less
In 1930, Time magazine’s cover proclaimed John Dos Passos the most important writer on the Left in the U.S., and classified him along with Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as one of the most important of the “Lost Generation” writers for his innovative modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s. But by 1938 he had cut ties with leftist organizations in the U.S., begun publishing in anti-Communist journals, become estranged from leftist friends such as Hemingway and playwright John Howard Lawson, and was ostracized by leftist critics for expressing his conviction that Communism was the paramount threat to individual liberties and democracy. Thereafter, his books were often criticized as ideologically doctrinaire, their style as falling far short of his earlier achievements, which had adapted into dynamic narrative the visual devices of cinema. John Dos Passos and Cinema explores these political and critical transitions through the lens of the writer’s little-known work, much of it archival, in the medium of film itself. As a novelist, he had used film as a subject and stylistic source; as screen writer, he evolved his methods directly from the cinema’s visual language, demonstrating how potently the medium could be manipulated for political and commercial profit.
