Catastrofi. Disastri nucleari e incidenti spaziali nell’immaginario britannico (1950-1968)

In the 1950s and 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War, the motifs of nuclear disaster and spaceflight-related accidents began to infiltrate the catastrophic imagination, thus becoming a basic constituent of postmodern identity. The works of John Wyndham, Nevil Shute, Stanley Kramer, Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, J.G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick – critically situated figures, who are suspended between different worlds – prove that such an imagination is timely and persistent. It is also capable of crossing the border between genres, media and national cultures. Ultimately, these works record an attempt to address a resurgent trauma, which haunts the cultural memory; a trauma liable to be seen, among other things, as an unfathomable outcome of the war, with its harvest of death and destruction, foreshadowing the sequence of nuclear and spaceflight apocalyptic images to come. While essentially unutterable, traumatic experience produces frightening and alluring visions, tied to sublime aesthetics. Such visions also disclose the dark, repressed side of culture, laying bare its phantoms, all too often overlooked but ever present.