Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: : This essay explores a predatory variant of optimism rooted in the assumption that catastrophe must be elsewhere. Engaging literary, philosophical, and scientific texts from the Enlightenment to the present—including N. K. Jemisin's speculative fiction—the essay focuses on earthquakes as both literal and metaphorical ruptures that exemplify elsewhere catastrophe: a centuries-long cultural imagination of catastrophe that culminates in a particular US national delusion of immunity to disaster.
Source: ELH
Author: Anna Brickhouse
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4414034106