DestroyMe.

September 30, 2007 9:15 PM

Looking for books about destruction.

I'm making up the preliminary book list for an independent study I'm interested in doing next semester about literary figurations of destruction and mass death, and I wanted to pick the hive brain to fill in my gaps.

I'm looking for both theoretical works and high literary works. On the theory side, Agamben, Arendt, Mbembe's necropolitics, things like this. On the literary side, the single best example I can think for the sort of book I'm looking for is Sebald's Austerlitz.

I'm also interested in film on the subject, if anything springs to mind.

My focus is on the twentieth and twentieth-first century, and while works can be from any language they must have been translated into English.

Thanks in advance for anything you come up with.

posted by BackwardsCity to writing & language (26 comments total)

Perhaps you could be more specific about what you mean by 'destruction'?
posted by mr. remy at 9:25 PM on September 30, 2007

Fiction ok? Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is a pretty good dystopia dealing with the destruction of an advanced capitalist society.
posted by arcticwoman at 9:33 PM on September 30, 2007

"Destruction" seems vague to me, too (war? apocalypse? holocaust? mass violence in general?), but a couple that nevertheless spring immediately to mind are Beckett's Endgame (end of the world embodied in mutually destructive relationships) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (destruction of Africa under colonialism; inspiration for the film Apocalypse Now, which is also amazing).
posted by scody at 9:48 PM on September 30, 2007

The World Without Us has been in the news lately. It’s a non-fiction account of the destruction that would take place if humans ceased to exist.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear at 9:52 PM on September 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

Oh, and another couple of films, both from the past year: Children of Men and V for Vendetta.
posted by scody at 9:54 PM on September 30, 2007

apocalyptic novels
more post-apocalyptic novels
still more

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut is pretty much a no-brainer for images of destruction. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell is a great book about WWI whose campaigns were incredibly, brutally destructive. Naturally you would want to look into the atomic bomb detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi death camps, the Khmer Rouge, the genocide in Rwanda.... maybe you could narrow down what kind of destruction you're talking about?
posted by LobsterMitten at 10:05 PM on September 30, 2007

post apocalyptic books

Minority Voices on Dystopia

Can you recommend good post-apocalypse novels?

End of the world fiction books
posted by mr. remy at 10:10 PM on September 30, 2007

The Destructors, a short story, immediately sprung to mind for obvious reasons.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 10:27 PM on September 30, 2007

On the theory side, Verso did little series of books about 9/11; there was one by Zizek, one by Baudrillard and one by Virilio. The Zizek one ("Welcome to the Desert of the Real"), which I linked, draws on Agamben pretty heavily and I would definitely recommend.

Films I'd recommend:
-Jarhead (best viewed in light of Apocalypse Now, recommended upthread)
-Hiroshima, Mon Amour (duh)
-Alphaville (for the big synchronized swimming/execution scene)
-You could possibly look at horror/zombie movies, I'm thinking of the more globally apocalyptic ones like 28 Days Later, but that might take you too far afield.
-Grave of the Fireflies (if you want to be depressed beyond belief)
-Distant Journey is a Czech film made five years after the Holocaust and is one of the earliest films to deal with it; it portrays the experiences of people sent to Terezin, and seems like it would fit with your project.

Sorry no books, I'm film studies.
posted by SoftRain at 10:51 PM on September 30, 2007

Memory of the Camps was shot by the Allies occupying former German holdings. The quantity of corpses is astonishing.

The Gulag Archipelago is right up your alley: Destruction of ideals, destruction of justice, destruction of the capacity for progress, destruction of truth, destruction of trust, destruction of dignity, and destruction of many, many lives.
posted by eritain at 11:21 PM on September 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

Check out American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Not exaaactly sure it's about destruction, but there's at least one amazing scene in it. Super quick read.
posted by salvia at 11:53 PM on September 30, 2007

Hard to say what'll help you without hearing the thesis, but Gravity's Rainbow could be helpful, depending. It's about destruction (rocket impacts) and the various methods undertaken to interpret and understand it (statistics, the weird ESP stuff, Pavlov and Slothrop).
posted by moift at 12:45 AM on October 1, 2007

Sebald's essay On the Natural History of Destruction should interest you.
posted by misteraitch at 1:37 AM on October 1, 2007

Schumpeter: Creative Destruction
posted by biffa at 2:18 AM on October 1, 2007

Fahrenheit 451
posted by beige at 4:53 AM on October 1, 2007

Sorry to be so vague, but I was hoping to cast as wide a net as possible. These have all been great so far. The 9/11 essays and the World War II examples are the ones I'm most likely to use, if that helps. Thanks!
posted by BackwardsCity at 5:15 AM on October 1, 2007

Also by Neil Gaiman is Sandman which includes the characters Death and Destruction.
posted by dorkwad at 5:24 AM on October 1, 2007

Seconding Fahrenheit 451.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 6:25 AM on October 1, 2007

On the Beach
posted by JimN2TAW at 7:10 AM on October 1, 2007

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
Seconding Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A. C. Grayling
posted by lukemeister at 7:42 AM on October 1, 2007

You should check out Sebald's other work, particularly The Rings of Saturn and On the Natural History of Destruction.

Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History is an obvious choice, theory-wise.

Doris Lessing's Memoirs of A Survivor is philosophically and spiritually very close to Austerlitz. The narrator, hiding in her apartment, is watching the destruction of civilization outside her window. At the same time, her own mind is dissolving and opening into itself. There's an incredible scene in the book where the narrator, in a sort of dream-world, sees a vast room where shadowy figures are piecing together fragments of carpet. It's a really good one to read with Benjamin and Sebald.
posted by ourobouros at 7:42 AM on October 1, 2007

A new post at robot wisdom provides a list of 50 and some discussion about dystopia films,many based on books.
posted by hortense at 10:10 AM on October 1, 2007

Not really "high literary works" but the japanese are quite fascinated with mass destruction, i wonder where did they get that from.

Akira the manga and the film deals with two mass destruction events.
Evangelion deals with the Apocalypse.
All the movie of the Kaiju genre deals with great amounts of destruction (Godzilla, Gamera and so on)
More to the point the movie Black Rain is about the Hiroshima bombing as well as the manga Barefoot Gen.
The manga Dragon Head deals with the aftermath of a massive earthquake.
An earthquake is also responsible for massive destruction in the recent Japan Sinks and its parody Everyone but Japan Sinks
posted by SageLeVoid at 12:07 PM on October 1, 2007

seconding On the Beach (even though it's already best-answered, I am trying to make sure you get around to it!)
posted by whatzit at 2:57 PM on October 1, 2007

The novel Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse is excellent, telling the stories of several Hirsohima survivors.
posted by goo at 9:48 PM on October 1, 2007

The Road is interesting, in that we don't know what caused the destruction.
posted by rush at 1:18 PM on October 2, 2007