In Don DeLillo's White Noise,
the media response to a near plane crash suggests, in Biel's words, that "postmodern disasters... happen for the sake of television." In his introduction to these 13 essays, Biel argues that "disasters generate meanings and that these meanings... constitute an inseparable... part of the disasters' histories." Covering disasters both natural (hurricanes in colonial America, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and mechanical (the Challenger
explosion, Chicago's deadly 1977 el train crash), these essays use contemporary media and political responses to explicate the cultural ramifications of the events. Novels published after the great Chicago fire of 1871 emphasized how the fire was both a punishment for the city's sins and also "the inscrutable workings of a divine hand" to make Chicago a more perfect physical city. Feminist writings used the chivalry of male passengers in the 1912 Titanic
sinking to criticize "the failure of men to protect women and children on shore," while African-Americans' view of it as a "white disaster" generated a large body of populist poems and songs that celebrated the absence of black victims. Some writers use these events to mark consequential moments of cultural change (the role of scientific engineering after the Galveston flood of 1900) or to mark journalistic biases (Chicago's major newspapers immediately blamed the African-American motorman of dereliction after the el disaster). Biel, the director of studies in history and literature at Harvard, has assembled a provocative and illuminating collection. (Dec.)
Forecast:We may be too close to September 11 to appreciate a study of the meanings of disaster; still, the attacks could spur interest in how Americans responded to past disasters. This could reach a general readership if NYU can generate some publicity for it.
