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Circling Ground Zero

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peter Schwenger
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Abstract

Nuclear holocaust is often mapped as a circle around a point designated zero. Zero itself, historically a paradoxical sign, recapitulates in its form the circle around an absent center. The paradoxes of this (non)center inform Derrida's pivotal essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” And all these paradoxes bear on Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker, which takes place two thousand years after a catastrophic nuclear war. Set in the circle of towns surrounding what was once Canterbury, it evokes a center that is nothing less than “the idear of us.” Hoban uses continual reinterpretations and shifting tangents to generate a narrative circle in motion, both counterpart of and counter to the circling Power Ring that produced the nuclear zero.

Type
Cluster on Modern Fiction
Information
PMLA , Volume 106 , Issue 2 , March 1991 , pp. 251 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1991

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References

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