| "The End, or Life in the Nuclear Age: Modes of Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form" is a transnational study of the experiences of Americans, Japanese Americans, and Japanese in the nuclear age as expressed in post-World War II literature, television, and cinema. I use the figure of the bomb as a way of understanding the historical, political, and linguistic impacts of modernity—crystallized in the image of the nuclear bomb—on our contemporary moment. I argue that the world has become fully global, not because all peoples experience the same material conditions of life, but because the nuclear age is one in which the world is conditioned for the possibility of the end of life as such. This project responds to key cultural and literary theorists writing from the aftermath of the Holocaust in Europe (in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Paul Virilio, and Michel Foucault), by enlarging the scope of their critique of modernity to include the atomic bombing of Japan. Crucially, I argue that nuclear war is not merely a futural event as commonly understood by most Western theorists. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demands that we account for how acts of terror committed by the West against the non-West have discursively given rise to an age in which nuclear technology functions as the symbol for both the ultimate technological triumph of Western science, and total planetary destruction. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to further development of the interdisciplinary field of nuclear criticism.;Through a close reading of Japanese hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) essays, Japanese anime (animation) and cinema, American Cold War novels, and Japanese American Bildungsromane I trace the emergence of an aesthetics of the fissure that resists the structuring logic of a global nuclear modernity organizing populations according to target sites and kill zones. In order to understand this aesthetics of fissure I analyze the literary concepts of semiotic liminality, mimesis, melodrama, and Bildungsroman alongside political discourses of nuclear strategy, Hegel's philosophy of history, and feminist theory. Thus, this dissertation creates a comparativist approach that takes seriously the inextricable connection between world literature and world politics. |
