Title Waiting for the sky to fall : the age of verticality in American narrative / Ruth Mackay

Published Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2016] ©2016

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 255 pages) : illustrations Contents Introduction. The age of verticality : the closure of the frontier to the 9/11 memorial, 1890-2011 -- "Down Down Down He Shot" : Winsor Mccay's work, vertical collapse, and time in the modernist city -- Upton Sinclair's Vertical infernos : oil procurement and disaster culture -- "The horizon was an illusion" : flight, escape, and imagining vertical space in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the dead -- Terror/power : Allen Ginsberg's nuclear poetics and the space race -- Traversing vertical space : Philippe Petit's wire-walk, danger, and transformation -- Coda: Up and down stories Summary "Waiting for the Sky to Fall: The Age of Verticality in American Narrative by Ruth Mackay traces the figures of flight, grievous falls, and collapsing towers, all of which haunt American narratives before and after 9/11. Mackay examines how these events prefigure 9/11, exploring the narrative residue left by the "end" of horizontal space--when settlers reached America's Pacific Coast, leaving nowhere westward on the continent to go. She then continues into the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. This period of time marks an era of verticality: an age that offers a transformed concept of the limits of space, entwined with a sense of anxiety and trepidation." "With this study, Mackay asks: In what oblique ways has verticality leaked into American narrative? Why do metaphors of up and down recur across the twentieth century? With close readings of Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Winsor McCay's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland, Upton Sinclair's Oil! and its film rendering There Will Be Blood, Allen Ginsberg's poetic dissections of the nuclear bomb, and Leslie Marmon Silko's imagining of flight in Almanac of the Dead, this interdisciplinary study culminates with a discussion of Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. Waiting for the Sky to Fall examines how vertical representation cleaves to, and often transforms the associations of, specific events that are physically and visually disorienting, disquieting, or even traumatic"--Publisher's description Analysis Verticality in literature Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-246) and index Notes Print version record Subject American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism American fiction -- 21st century -- History and criticism American fiction -- 20th century -- Themes, motives American fiction -- 21st century -- Themes, motives Place (Philosophy) Space and time in literature. Space perception in literature. Anxiety in literature. Metaphor in literature. LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General. LITERARY CRITICISM -- General. American fiction Metaphor Place (Philosophy) Space and time Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc. Literary criticism. Critiques littéraires. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780814274149 0814274145

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