Katherine Sugg | Central Connecticut State University (original) (raw)
Books by Katherine Sugg
McFarland Press, 2022
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie ap... more Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens—typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future?
This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.
Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/apocalypse-and-heroism-in-popular-culture/
Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2008
“In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre refl... more “In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre reflects ‘at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.’ Sugg brilliantly affirms this insight by showing how writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Rosario Castellanos, Zoé Valdés, Cherrie Moraga, and Julia Álvarez, engage allegorical and performative strategies to say things that the novel can no longer say, to transcend identity politics and its positivist paradigms, to reposition the relations of consciousness and community. Furthermore, her transamerican perspective on these profoundly transamerican writers complicates the cultural connections that she (and they) make between genre and gender. This book will serve as a model for the comparative study of emerging expressive forms in and across the Americas.”--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston
Papers by Katherine Sugg
Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, 2019
Journal of American Studies, 2015
From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction ... more From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central "crises": late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the "crisis" of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future foror a nostalgic return tomasculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it producesroots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of "all against all" that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-"official man", the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to "finally start living"reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television showespecially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgustfurther counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving "back" to a brutal settler colonial logic or "forward" to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, "zombie logic," but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./S governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?
ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D, Jan 1, 2003
CR: The New Centennial Review, Jan 1, 2003
Twentieth Century Literature 57.1
Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, 2009
American Quarterly, Jan 1, 2000
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Chasqui, Jan 1, 1999
... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina ... more ... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina herself has admitted the autobiographical basis of a number of her novels, her narrative strategies notoriously undermine transparent notions of personal history ...
McFarland Press, 2022
Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie ap... more Stories of world-ending catastrophe have featured prominently in film and television. Zombie apocalypses, climate disasters, alien invasions, global pandemics and dystopian world orders fill our screens—typically with a singular figure or tenacious group tasked with saving or salvaging the world. Why are stories of End Times crisis so popular with audiences? And why is the hero so often a white man who overcomes personal struggles and major obstacles to lead humanity toward a restored future?
This book examines the familiar trope of the hero and the recasting of contemporary anxieties in films like The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer and Mad Max: Fury Road. Some have familiar roots in Western cultural traditions yet many question popular assumptions about heroes and heroism to tell new and fascinating stories about race, gender and society and the power of individuals to change the world.
Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/apocalypse-and-heroism-in-popular-culture/
Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2008
“In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre refl... more “In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer’s choice of literary genre reflects ‘at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.’ Sugg brilliantly affirms this insight by showing how writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Rosario Castellanos, Zoé Valdés, Cherrie Moraga, and Julia Álvarez, engage allegorical and performative strategies to say things that the novel can no longer say, to transcend identity politics and its positivist paradigms, to reposition the relations of consciousness and community. Furthermore, her transamerican perspective on these profoundly transamerican writers complicates the cultural connections that she (and they) make between genre and gender. This book will serve as a model for the comparative study of emerging expressive forms in and across the Americas.”--Lois Parkinson Zamora, University of Houston
Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders, 2019
Journal of American Studies, 2015
From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction ... more From The Road to The Walking Dead, contemporary apocalyptic fictions narrativize the conjunction of two central "crises": late liberal capitalism and twenty-first-century masculinity. This conjunction underlines the insights of a variety of scholars and cultural critics who analyze the "crisis" of contemporary masculinity, often specifically white masculinity, as a product of recent economic and social transformations, including the perceived disempowering of white male authority in a neoliberal era of affective labor, joblessness and multiculturalism. But the apocalypse, especially as a television series, is a rather peculiar narrative vehicle for the articulation of a transformative future foror a nostalgic return tomasculine agency and authority. Focussing on questions of subjection and agency in the late liberal/neoliberal moment, I suggest that zombie apocalypse stages a debate on the status of masculine agency that has roots extending deep into the foundations of liberal modernity and the gendered selfhood it producesroots that are ironically exposed by the popular cultural referent that dominates The Walking Dead: the frontier myth. The frontier and the apocalypse both draw from Hobbesian prognostications of a state of nature as relentless competition and a war of "all against all" that are foundational to modern liberal political theory and questions of sovereignty, self-interest, and collective governance. But they also index a narrative antidote to the erasure of political agency as traditionally enshrined in liberal democratic norms and traditions. Like the western, the zombie apocalypse speculates about possible ways in which masculine agency in liberal modernity might be reimagined and/or reinvigorated. In the place of a tired, automated neo-"official man", the apocalypse in The Walking Dead promises an opportunity to "finally start living"reminding us that white masculinity figures precisely the Enlightenment liberal subject-citizen and the authoritative, if highly fictional, agency which has been notoriously crushed within regimes of late capitalist biopower. And yet, even as the zombie apocalypse engages foundational myths of liberal modernity, it elaborates them in surprisingly nihilistic set pieces and an apparently doomed, serial narrative loop (there is no end to the zombie apocalypse and life in it is remarkably unpleasant). The eruption of haptic elements in the television showespecially in the visual and aural technologies that allow representations of bodies, suffering, dismemberment, mutability, disgustfurther counters the apparent trajectory of apocalyptic allegory and opens it to alternative logics and directions. The narrative options of the zombie apocalypse thus seem to be moving "back" to a brutal settler colonial logic or "forward" to an alternative, perhaps more ethical, "zombie logic," but without humans. This essay is interested in what these two trajectories have to say to each other and what that dialogue, and dialectic, indicate about contemporary economic re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./S governance as it is experienced and translated affectively into popular narrative and cultural product. That is, to what extent is the racist and economic logic of settler colonialism already infected by the specter of another logic of abjection and otherness, one that is figured both by the zombies and by the nonnarrative function of spectacles of embodied male suffering? And what does that slippage between logics and directions tell us about the internal workings of settler colonialism and economic liberalism that have always been lodged within mythic fantasies of the frontier?
ENVIRONMENT AND PLANNING D, Jan 1, 2003
CR: The New Centennial Review, Jan 1, 2003
Twentieth Century Literature 57.1
Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature, 2009
American Quarterly, Jan 1, 2000
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Chasqui, Jan 1, 1999
... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina ... more ... FICATIONS: THE FATHERLANDS OF SIL? VIA MOLINA Katherine Sugg ... literature. Although Molina herself has admitted the autobiographical basis of a number of her novels, her narrative strategies notoriously undermine transparent notions of personal history ...