Review of Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex by Jessica Hurley (University of Minnesota Press)

Jessica Hurley’s Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex examines how postwar literature has responded to discourses, both official and unofficial, of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power. Hurley explores how literature from a variety of genres offer a different sense of past, present, and future in response, thus constructing the apocalypse as a transfiguration rather than as a revelation.

Maria Beneyto: La creació literària de la dona múltiple i diversa al llarg del temps

Resum: Maria Beneyto es una de les autores fonamentals de la literatura valenciana depostguerra amb una llarga trajectòria tant en l’àmbit narratiu com poètic. Realitzem unapetita introducció al voltant del context i les circumstàncies en les quals desenvolupa la seuaactivitat creadora i, a més, fem una anàlisi de la seua obra, que ens dibuixa, entre altres aspectes,una radiografia del signe femení contemplat des de la diversitat i el compromís. Peraquest motiu estudiem aquest tipus d’imatges relacionades amb els referents ficcionals i realstot reivindicant una identitat marcada per la diferència. Paraules clau: Maria Beneyto, literatura feminista, literatura de postguerra Abstract: Maria Beneyto is one of the fundamental authors of post-war Valencian literaturewith a long career in both the narrative and poetic fields. We make a short introductionabout the context and circumstances in which he develops his creative activity, in addition,we make an analysis of his work, which draws us, among other things, an x-ray of the femalesign seen from the diversity and the commitment. For this reason, we study this typeof image related to fictional and real references, claiming an identity marked by difference. Keywords: Maria Beneyto, feminist literatura, postwar literature

Epilogue: Modernist Afterlives

While J.G. Ballard has been treated as a leading postmodernist, his dystopian fiction can best be understood in the mid-century architectural context of Huxley’s and Orwell’s pioneering narratives. Accordingly, the temporality of Ballard’s novels, with their “future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted,” aligns with Ballard’s interest in the ruins of “modernism of the heroic period”: a prewar utopianism irreparably compromised by the concrete and steel martial architecture of World War II. Ballard suggests that the postwar modern movement, rather than simply relying on war energies, produced structures whose very forms channel violence; state violence and interpersonal violence are inseparable. In Ballard’s narratives of buildings that outlive their makers, the new architecture portends extinction rather than new expressions of humanism. Through this architectural death drive, Ballard portrays modernism itself as a haunting presence, hovering over postwar literature as well as the postwar nation.

Durchfall, Auschwitz’s Unwritten Story: Filth and Excremental Violence in Tadeusz Borowski’s Postwar Fiction

As an author central to postwar literature on the concentration and death camp experience, Tadeusz Borowski chose to depict the relatively taboo subject of excremental violence. Borowski’s documentary fiction depicted an aspect of history that was, especially in 1946 after his own incarceration and survival, both raw and controversial. Writing in Polish as part of a collective work, Borowski was intent on speaking in his native language to a shattered Polish nation. This article analyzes how Borowski drew attention to human rights violations by writing about excremental violence. It further examines how Borowski eschewed oversimplified postwar categories of perpetrators, victims, and resisters. Instead, drawing upon his own experiences in Auschwitz, Dautmergen, and Dachau, his works articulate the powerlessness of those in the camps and the dehumanizing conditions they faced, thus challenging any misleading narratives regarding heroic agency.