Postmodern Nihilism, Motion, and the Space of Postmodern Warfare

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220706.007How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Nihilism; Motion; New machine; Postmodernism

Abstract

Few studies have established a link between ‘motion’, ‘nihilism’, and the ‘new machine’, although nihilism is a typical psychological feature in postmodern texts and the alienation of the new machine is a factor that cannot be ignored. This essay analyses the nihilistic tendencies of the characters and their unconscious movements in the postmodern war space in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five by applying the ‘new machine’ perspective proposed by Fredric Jameson in The Cultural Turn. With reference to Khatin-Zadeh Omid’s understanding of movement and non-movement, Fredric Jameson’s point remains valid within the macro-concept of movement, which includes the transient cessation of movement. This research will provide a new interpretation of the visualisation of nihilistic tendencies within characters in postmodern texts.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Luanming Xing
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/07/14
TI  - Postmodern Nihilism, Motion, and the Space of Postmodern Warfare
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange（ICLACE 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 26
EP  - 30
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220706.007
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220706.007
ID  - Xing2022
ER  -