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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

"Ghosts from the future: post-apocalyptic narratives in Scotland and the displacement of memory"

Résumé

This chapter examines six apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novels by Scottish authors, John Burnside’s Glister (2008) and Havergey (2017), The Sunlight Pilgrims (2016) by Jenni Fagan, and Louise Welsh’s trilogy A Lovely Way to Burn (2014), Death is a Welcome Guest (2015) and No Dominion (2017), and the way they use the futuristic postulate they are based on to set the present as an object of historical scrutiny. The novels all conjure up ghosts from the future, which enable them to reflect on the historical, environmental and political “juncture” we are at, and raise the issue of the displacement of memory. The chapter draws on theories of the apocalypse, in particular Michael Foessel’s (faire monde), Jean-Paul Engélibert’s (the crumbling of order) and Georgio Agamben’s (messianic time), to show how the novels’ indictment of the present takes on an ecopolitical dimension. All attempt to restore history within presentism, by exploiting the contraction of time between the (ecological, political) crisis and the end. They also eschew the biblical notion of the New Jerusalem, instead foregrounding nomadism, both spatial and temporal, for its capacity to end presentism by asserting humans’ connection to the world. In so doing, they provide an ecopolitics and an ecopoetics of wandering which places the land at the heart of their renegotiation of historiography, by emphasising historical continuity between the human and the non-human, redefining the notion of community in the process. This continuity is best expressed with Jean Luc Nancy’s concept of the inoperative community, i.e. a community with a “spontaneous inclination to come together”.
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Dates et versions

hal-03966617 , version 1 (31-01-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03966617 , version 1

Citer

Marie-Odile Pittin-Hedon. "Ghosts from the future: post-apocalyptic narratives in Scotland and the displacement of memory". Memory and Identity: Ghosts of the Past in the English-speaking World, Routledge, 2022, 9781032012841. ⟨hal-03966617⟩
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