Cultures of Terror: Nuclear Criticism During and Since the Cold War

Abstract

AbstractNuclear Criticism emerged late in the Cold War as a short‐lived but important critical enterprise, seeking to understand the cultural impact of military and civilian nuclear technology. Critics argued that the possibility of a civilization‐ending nuclear war affected the production and reception of literary texts, and that scholars should reflect this in their research and their teaching. ‘Cultures of Terror’ looks afresh at this critical moment and makes two claims.First, it argues that in Nuclear Criticism two broadly oppositional trends in literary studies came together, one ethically orientated, while the other was more sceptical of an ethics of literature and rooted in cutting‐edge theoretical debates. Second, it calls for a new Nuclear Criticism. Such a criticism can, in part, revisit ‘nuclear’ texts of the Cold War era, reading them with perspectives made possible by the post‐Cold War perspective. It can, also, though embark on a more radical enterprise, questioning the simple assumption that nuclear issues ceased to be pressing with the fall of the Berlin Wall, tracing the morphing of nuclear anxiety into other fears, and contextualizing contemporary conceptions of ‘terror’ in terms of an earlier geopolitics of nuclear anxiety.