Horn: The Future as Catastrophe

Eva Horn, former member of the ICLA theory committee, published The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. Published by Columbia UP, this is the translation, by Valentine Pakis, of Horn’s German-language book on the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analysing the catastrophic imaginary from its roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War’s apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned.

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