CRASH! : Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields - Randy Malamud

CRASH!

Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields

By: Randy Malamud

Paperback | 9 January 2025

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $44.99

$44.50

or 4 interest-free payments of $11.13 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 5 to 10 business days

CRASH! explores the fascinating, revealing, and surprising cultural impact of plane crashes across art, literature, music, media, and creative nonfiction.

Plane crashes are covered extensively but they are not analyzed very deeply, beyond rote media reports and forensic accident investigations. This is despite the voluminous, diverse, and fascinating cultural materials — poems and novels, songs, films, art, TV series, and on and on — that emerge in the wake of aviation disasters. Randy Malamud reanimates these tragic events and identifies how they persist and resonate through our culture—more than we might have imagined, and in intricately far-reaching ways.

A unique and extraordinarily wide-ranging cultural examination, CRASH! takes the reader on a journey that includes reflections on flight phobia, themes of crash survival (with asides on Lord of the Flies, The Little Prince, and Ernest Hemingway's two-day two-crash adventure), the existentialism of pilots' last words, the day the music died, deep dives into modernist plane wreck paintings, kamikaze pilots and their Zen death poems, plane crashes before planes, 'race, crash, and gender,' and the cultural aftermath of 9/11.

Ultimately, Malamud shows that crashes do not bring about complete and total destruction: we accomplish some degree of restoration by shoring fragments against the ruins. The plane is dead; long live the plane.

More in Literary Theory

Oil : Object Lessons - Michael Tondre

$19.99

How to Read a Book : A Touchstone book - Mortimer J. Adler

RRP $34.99

$23.35

33%
OFF
Albert Camus and the Philosophy of the Ordinary - Raymond D. Boisvert
Art Monsters : Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art - Lauren Elkin

RRP $55.00

$39.90

27%
OFF
Create Dangerously : Penguin Modern - Albert Camus
An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory : 6th Edition - Andrew Bennett
The Social Production of Art : Communications and Culture - Janet Wolff
Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff

RRP $31.95

$29.35

Shakespeare and Fun : The Birth of Entertainment Value - Donald Hedrick
Bandwidths : Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart - David LaRocca
CRASH! : Aviation Disasters and the Cultural Debris Fields - Randy Malamud
Kant, Adorno, and the Forms of History - William S. Allen

RRP $180.00

$132.25

27%
OFF