Plots Literary Form Conspiracy Culture 1st Edition by Ben Carver Dana Craciun, Todor Hristov ISBN 9780367500696 0367500698

1 Introduction

Genre

Narrative patterns

Rhetoric

Fictionality

Future perspectives

References

2 ‘Turning points’: Plots in conspiracy and literature

Illumination/Illuminati

Stage/staged

The resources of scepticism

Training in suspicion

Refining the medium

Notes

References

Section 1 Conspiracy theories about books and authors

3 Erich Auerbach’s conspiracy theory

Figural Mimesis

Figures of conspiracy

Conclusion: QAnon’s conspiracy of figures

Notes

References

4 In pursuit of nationhood vis-à-vis Russia: The search for lost manuscripts in post-Soviet countries

Ukraine: Mikola Khvylovy’s second volume of The Woodcocks

Belarus: Uladzimir Karatkevich’s second volume of The Ears of Rye under Thy Sickle

Discussion and conclusion

Notes

References

5 Conspiracy reading: New literary perspectives on paranoia in Thomas Pynchon

Introduction

Pynchon conspiracies

Paranoid readers

Note

References

Section 2 Plotting: narrative forms of conspiracy

6 ‘The cash nexus’: Realism and conspiracy in Balzac and Dickens

Money plots

Realism and the secret society

Friends and unfriends

Realism and racism

Notes

References

7 Conspiracy narratives in serialized comics: An exploration

The form of comics and the reader’s imagination

The comics industry and the writer’s imagination

Paul McCartney and the Phantom are dead (and Spider-Man is not Spider-Man)

The Eternaut and the world conspiracy against South America

The Incredible Hulk after The X Files and 9/11

Concluding remarks: to be continued?

Note

References

8 Conspiracy narratives and American apocalypticism in The Turner Diaries

Conspiracy and apocalypse

The Turner Diaries

Conclusion

References

Section 3 Fictional disclosures: conspiracy and the politics of truth

9 Suspicious fictions: The fictionalizing acts in a conspiracist novel

A vulgar novel

Reality effect

Facts from fiction

Transgressive fiction

Conspiracist pedagogy

Beyond conspiracism

Notes

References

10 Half-truths: On an instrument of post-truth politics (and conspiracy narratives)

The post-factual: a new phenomenon?

Half-truths produce plausibility

Half-truths are (short) stories

Half-truths are connective and ‘multiversional’

Notes

References

11 Men make their own history: Conspiracy as counter-narrative in the German political field

Conspiracy and criticism

The RAF as a disruption of the real

The real is partisan: F. J. Degenhardt’s Brandstellen (1975)

The imaginative work of order of the fragmented proletariat

Terror as a deformation of the revolutionary imagination

Terrorism as an imagination of order

Romantic anti-capitalism

Conclusion: literature and social criticism

Notes

References

Index