The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century
Many contemporary novelists, such as Atwood, Mitchell, and McCarthy, have flocked to a literary form that was once considered lowbrow: the post-apocalyptic novel. Calling on her broad knowledge of the history of apocalyptic literature, Hicks argues these writers employ conventions of the post-apocalyptic to reengage with key features of modernity.
Dating Big Bird by L Zigman This friendly, enthusiastic audiobook will appeal to anyone who has ever felt the pressures of a "biological clock." Hicks introduces the listener to Ellen, a single, successful career woman who believes that happiness can be found shopping at BabyGap and reading Madeline for the tenth time. Alas, many obstacles stand in the narrator's way. Witnessing the journey through, over, and around these obstacles is made entertaining by Hicks's account of Ellen's friends. The only drawback is the nasal lisp affected for the voice of Ellen's niece, "The Pickle." The book is best when it avoids over- emphasized sentimentality and simply shares a good story.
Who is responsible for the strange messages that keep turning up up for Mr Goon? Are Mr and Mrs Smith involved and does Mrs Hicks know more than she appears to? Fatty and the gang are determined to find out.
An important dimension of the "meaning" of the border text exists in the difference between the referential codes of author and reader. Since the special ontology of the border text makes the reader a conspicuous collaborator in the "writing" of the text, the same relationship of difference can obtain between the reader and herself as between reader and author. For the reader willing to engage in "border crossing," the "non-identities among the codes of the writer, the reader(s), and "sociohistorical semiotic" contexts create an ontologically special place or space within which "a remembering occurs" whose form varies with the desires and historical and political knowledge of the border crosser. Framed by a largely theoretical introduction and a meditative conclusion on the semiotics of work by Sandinistas and Chicano poets as well as her own creative writing, Hicks's discussion of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad), Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch (Rayeula) and A Manual for Manuel (Libro de Manuel) and Luisa Valenzuela's He Who Searches (Como en la guerra) and Other Weapons (Cambio de armas) inventively challenges readers to "deterritorialize" their categories of literary and political analysis.
