The rhetoric of future harm: Representations and figurations of the child in contemporary American discourses of catastrophe.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

My objective in this project is to draw attention to the frequency with which the figure of the child appears in representations of catastrophe and to map out the causes and consequences of that association. The Rhetoric of Future Harm is thus a rhetorical and tropological study of the child as a figure in contemporary discourse. In what follows, I will propose that the child-figure condenses fears about the human future. A longstanding figure in American culture, the child in contemporary representations of catastrophe, I contend, captures and contains the energies of change, transforming them into anxious fantasies of harm. In particular, I look at representations and rhetorics that bring the child's economy of meanings to bear on the threatened human future. I argue that the deep and pervasive anxiety about the future of the human discloses the apprehension of complexity. I find in this apprehension the nascent recognition of further futures and new forms for a (post)-humanity and a post-humanism. The child-figure is thus a deeply ambivalent attempt to harness, capture and control, the movements of the future and the meanings of life-itself.
The Rhetoric of Future Harm investigates four intensively invested sites where life-itself takes the face of the child: the rhetoric of urgency employed by popular environmentalism; the individuation of life characteristic of rescue narratives and reproductive futurism; the sacralization of the human world in post-apocalypses and the cultivation of regimes of meaning in literary theory. The middle two chapters, "Rescue and Reproductive Futurism" and "Redemptive Catastrophes and Metaphysical Materialisms" conduct close studies of single novels, Joanna Russ's feminist SF novel We Who Are About To... (1973) in the second chapter and Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic The Road (2006) in the third. Taken together these chapters represent a sustained investigation of the metaphysics of the child under conditions of ecological threat. The first and last chapters, "Eco-Catastrophe and the Queer Matter of the Future" and "Life Matters Beyond the Child," look at the distributions of the rhetoric of the child in non-fictional discursive domains.