Toxins, drugs, and global systems: Risk and narrative in the contemporary novel

American Literature

Volumn 74, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 747-778

  Heise, Ursula K ^a  

^a Och Spine at New York Presbyterian Hospitals

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 1542587488     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-74-4-747     Document Type: Review

References (41)

1. Lawrence Buell refers to risk-theoretical literature in "Toxic Discourse," Critical Inquiry 24 (spring 1998): 639-65
2. which is now the first chapter of his Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), 30-54
3. See Mark Osteen's introduction to Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, ed. Mark Osteen (New York: Penguin, 1998), vii; this edition also contains materials documenting the novel's parallels with the Bhopal accident (353-62). Further references to White Noise will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as WN
4. See, for example, Michael Valdez Moses's Heideggerian interpretation of this scene in "Lust Removed from Nature," in New Essays on "White Noise," ed. Frank Lentricchia (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), 63-86
5. For discussions of spectacle, simulation, and the role of media in shaping reality in White Noise, see John N. Duvall, "The (Super) Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise," in White Noise: Text and Criticism, ed. Osteen, 432-55
6. Lentricchia, "Tales of the Electronic Tribe," in New Essays on White Noise, ed. Lentricchia, 87-113
7. N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, "Toxic Events: Post-modernism and Don DeLillo's White Noise," Cambridge Quarterly 23.4 (1994): 303-23
8. Richard Kerridge, "Small Rooms and the Ecosystem: Environmentalism and Don DeLillo's White Noise," in Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature, ed. Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells (London: Zed Books, 1998), 182-95
9. Interestingly, this remark occurs in a book review of Richard Powers's Gain, which I will discuss later (see A. O. Scott, "A Matter of Life and Death," New York Review of Books, 17 December 1998, 38-42). In Gain, unlike White Noise, Scott contends, chemical risk is not symbolic (41). But simply rephrasing "ambient dread" as "environmental dread" in Scott's claim would restore full materiality to the toxic event
10. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, 51
11. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992)
12. See Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 3-40
13. See Chauncey Starr, "Social Benefit versus Technological Risk," Science 165 (19 September 1969): 1232-238
14. By tracing the field back to Starr, I follow the account presented in Ragnar E. Löfstedt and Lynn Frewer's introduction to their The Earthscan Reader in Risk and Modern Society (London: Earthscan, 1998), 3; Löfstedt and Frewer also outline a different account according to which the roots of risk theory can be traced back to the Chicago School of geography
15. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge, Eng: Polity Press, 1994)
16. Beck, Risikogesellschaft, 25; the translation to English is mine
17. For a well-articulated critique of this kind, see David Goldblatt, Social Theory and the Environment (Cambridge, Eng: Polity Press, 1996), 154-87
18. See Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York: Viking, 1989)
19. See Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, 2d ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999)
20. See Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982)
21. and Aaron Wildavsky and Karl Dake, "Theories of Risk Perception: Who Fears What and Why?" Daedalus 119 (fall 1990): 41-60
22. Steve Rayner gives an overview of cultural theory in risk analysis and offers a critique of the way in which Douglas and Wildavsky deploy it (see "Cultural Theory and Risk Analysis," in Social Theories of Risk, ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Dominic Golding [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992], 83-115)
23. See Baruch Fischhoff, Sarah Lichtenstein, Paul Slovic, Stephen L. Derby, and Ralph L. Keeney, Acceptable Risk (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 61-133
24. Paul Slovic, "Perception of Risk," Science 236 (17 April 1987): 280-85
25. Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Sarah Lichtenstein, "Lay Foibles and Expert Fables in Judgments about Risks," in Progress in Resource Management and Environmental Planning, ed. Timothy O'Riordan and R. Kerry Turner, 4 vols. (Chichester, Eng.: John Wiley, 1981), 3:161-202
26. See Roger E. Kasperson, et al., "The Social Amplification of Risk: A Conceptual Framework," Risk Analysis 8 (April 1988): 177-87
27. Roger E. Kasperson, "The Social Amplification of Risk: Progress in Developing an Integrative Framework," in Social Theories of Risk, ed. Krimsky and Golding, 153-78
28. James Flynn, Paul Slovic, and Howard Kunreuther, eds., Risk, Media, and Stigma: Understanding Public Challenges to Modern Science and Technology (London: Earthscan, 2001)
29. See Harry Otway, "Public Wisdom, Expert Fallibility: Toward a Contextual Theory of Risk," in Social Theories of Risk, ed. Krimsky and Golding, 215-28
30. and Brian Wynne, "Institutional Mythologies and Dual Societies in the Management of Risk," in The Risk Analysis Controversy: An Institutional Perspective, ed. Howard C. Kunreuther and Eryl V. Ley (Berlin: Springer, 1982), 127-43
31. See Andrew Ross, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (London: Verso, 1994), 159-201 (especially 166, 171-72)
32. and Jon Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics, and Popular Culture (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998)
33. The juxtaposition of two storylines, which is also featured in Powers's other novels, has been widely commented upon by his reviewers (see Walter Kirn, "Commercial Fiction," review of Gain, New York, 15 June 1998, 103
34. Paul Quinn, "On the Tracks of the Rhino," review of Gain, Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 2000, 22
35. and Scott, "Matter of Life and Death," 40). For a perceptive discussion of how the relation between the two strands of plot in Gain differs from that in the earlier novels due to the absence of a mediating figure, see Charles B. Harris, "'The Stereo View': Politics and the Role of the Reader in Gain," Review of Contemporary Fiction 18 (fall 1998): 97-109, especially 98-99
36. These two similarities are noted by Scott (who otherwise dismisses White Noise as a serious engagement with chemically induced illness) in "Matter of Life and Death," as well as by Michiko Kakutani ("Company Town's Prosperity and Pain," review of Gain, New York Times, 11 August 1998, E6)
37. Richard Powers, Gain (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 303-4; further references to Gain will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as G
38. This inversion is discussed by Jeffrey Williams in his review of Gain ("The Issue of Corporations: Richard Powers' Gain," Cultural Logic 2.2 [1999], 〈http://eserver.org/clogic/2-2/williamsrev.html〉, par. 9)
39. and Bruce Bawer, "Bad Company," review of Gain, New York Times Book Review, 21 June 1998, 11
40. see also Kakutani, "Company Town's Prosperity," E6
41. See Kirn, "Commercial Fiction," 103; and Williams, "Issue of Corporations."