TY - JOUR

T1 - Earthquake in Haiti

T2 - Kleist and Modern Disaster Discourse

AU - Holm, Isak Winkel

PY - 2012

Y1 - 2012

N2 - In the vocabulary of modern disaster research, Heinrich von Kleist's seminal short story "The Earthquake in Chile" from 1806 is a tale of disaster vulnerability. The story is not just about a natural disaster destroying the innocent city of Santiago but also about the ensuing social disaster orchestrated by the citizens of Santiago themselves. Three cognitive schemes play a role for the way Kleist – and his fictional characters – imagine the vulnerability of human society: the theodicy, the sublime, and the state of exception. These three symbolic forms are part of the surprisingly small and surprisingly stable repertoire of cultural concepts and images that, for several centuries now, govern the way we think about disasters and the way we act when they strike. The task of a cultural disaster research, the essay suggests, is to study the deep grammar of our common imagination of disaster surfacing in fictional as well as in factual disasters. Thus, the recent "cultural turn" in modern disaster research must be supplemented with a cultural-historical turn in the ambition to explore how modern disaster fiction reveal and rework the historical repertoire of symbolic forms through which we perceive disaster.

AB - In the vocabulary of modern disaster research, Heinrich von Kleist's seminal short story "The Earthquake in Chile" from 1806 is a tale of disaster vulnerability. The story is not just about a natural disaster destroying the innocent city of Santiago but also about the ensuing social disaster orchestrated by the citizens of Santiago themselves. Three cognitive schemes play a role for the way Kleist – and his fictional characters – imagine the vulnerability of human society: the theodicy, the sublime, and the state of exception. These three symbolic forms are part of the surprisingly small and surprisingly stable repertoire of cultural concepts and images that, for several centuries now, govern the way we think about disasters and the way we act when they strike. The task of a cultural disaster research, the essay suggests, is to study the deep grammar of our common imagination of disaster surfacing in fictional as well as in factual disasters. Thus, the recent "cultural turn" in modern disaster research must be supplemented with a cultural-historical turn in the ambition to explore how modern disaster fiction reveal and rework the historical repertoire of symbolic forms through which we perceive disaster.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - katastrofe

KW - sårbarhed

KW - Kleist (Heinrich von)

KW - sublime

KW - teodicé

KW - undtagelsestilstand

KW - Disasters

KW - vulnerability

KW - Kleist (Heinrich von)

KW - sublime

KW - theodicy

KW - state of exception

M3 - Journal article

SP - 49

EP - 66

JO - New German Critique

JF - New German Critique

SN - 0094-033X

IS - 115

ER -