Exhaustion and Regeneration in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Culture

The following three chapters focus on the unfolding of the (pre-/post-)apocalyptic literary and cinematographic scenarios. In “Pre-Apocalyptic Horror of Climate Change: Colonization and Oil Drilling in The Last Winter,” Tatiana Prorokova argues that, with its focus on the pre-apocalypse of climate change, Larry Fessenden’s The Last Winter acts as an environmental cautionary tale warning the viewers against the consequences of both growing human/nature misbalance and people’s refusal to acknowledge either their role in triggering the environmental crisis or the dangers it will bring. In “Permaculture and Utopian Regeneration in Starhawk’s City of Refuge,” Anna Gilarek examines the potential of permaculture design and philosophy to both trigger and facilitate spiritual, communal, and ecological healing and reconstruction amidst a dystopian wasteland. Finally, in “To Seek Out the Upright: The Quest for Regeneration in the Latest Works of Cormac McCarthy,” Szymon Wnuk engages in an in-depth analysis of the journey from exhaustion to regeneration depicted in three of Cormac McCarthy’s recent novels, No Country for Old Men, Sunset Limited and The Road, singling out the literal or metaphorical desert as the locus within which the struggles of McCarthy’s characters for regeneration unfold.

The last four chapters in the collection look towards art and social dynamics, pondering the role of the former in sustaining, reinvigorating, and reading the latter. In her chapter titled “Something Tells Me This Protest Is Far From Over: The Power of Indigenous Visual Art in the #NoDAPL Protests,” Léna Remy-Kovach discusses the role played by visual art in the protests of indigenous groups in Canada and the US against the environmental damage wreaked within tribal grounds by the policies of the federal governments. Ewelina Bańka’s “‘Viva la Santa de Cabora’: Dirt, Healing, and the New World Order in Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Hummingbird’s Daughter” constitutes an insightful reading of Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel, which focuses on the healing practice of the Mexican healer Terresa Urea in the times of the Porifirato regime and points to the relevance of Urrea’s novel for the current fraught situation at the Mexican-American border. In her chapter “American Anti-intellectualism and Artistic Creativity: Some Observations on the “Dumbing” of America at the Onset of the New Millennium,” Edyta Frelik presents anti-intellectualism as a trend noticeable in the United States at any given point in history and reflects on the role that art and artists can possibly play in countering America’s predilection for anti-intellectualism. In the final chapter of the collection, “Turmoil and Change: A View at the Legacy of the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession,” Mirosław Miernik addresses the economic crisis of 2008, concentrating both on the reasons for and repercussions of the crisis for the population at large and on the literary and cinematographic responses to the crisis.

Works Cited

Harari, Yuvahl Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Marc Amfreville