Research Catalog

Title

Catastrophizing : materialism and the making of disaster / Gerard Passannante.

Author

Passannante, Gerard Paul, 1978-

Publication

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

293 pages; 23 cm

Summary

When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism - the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci's imaginative experiments with nature's destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare's tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.--

Subject

• Catastrophizing
• Catastrophical, The
• Catastrophical, The, in art
• Catastrophical, The, in literature

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

Introduction: catastrophizing: a beginner's guide -- Leonardo's disasters -- Earthquakes of the mind -- Shakespeare's catastrophic "anything" -- The earthquake and the microscope -- Disaster before the sublime; or, Kant's catastrophes -- Afterword: catastrophizing in the age of climate change.

Call Number

JFD 19-3171

ISBN

• 9780226612218
• 022661221X

LCCN

2018036448

OCLC

1050456510

Author

Passannante, Gerard Paul, 1978- author.

Title

Catastrophizing : materialism and the making of disaster / Gerard Passannante.

Publisher

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Research Call Number

JFD 19-3171