Introduction : Descent and return
the katabanic imagination
1. Hell in our time. Is Hell a fable? ; Hell as the modern condition ; Descent and dissent in modern philosophy
2. Chronotopes of Hell. Generic features of katabatic narrative ; Bakhtin's Inferno : visionary versus historical chronotopes ; Unspeakable wisdom ; Conversion versus inversion ; Infernal inversion : Malcolm Lowrey's Under the volcano ; The absolute and 'my absolute' : Sarah Kofman's Smothered words
3. Auschwitz as Hell. Pathways through a life : The search for roots ; Black holes and the biblical Job ; A constellation of chronotopes : If this is a man ; Threshold crossing into Hell ; Auschwitz as education ; The visionary world ; On trial in Hell ; Sea-voyage and shipwreck ; The intersection of pathways
4. Surviving with ghosts : second generation Holocaust narratives. Bog-boys and fire children ; Vertigo and luminosity : W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz ; From depth to ascent : Anne Michaels' Fugitive pieces
5. Katabatic memoirs of mental illness. Down the rabbit hole ; Parallel worlds and protest culture : Susanna Kaysen's Girl, interrupted ; The schizophrenic hyperreal : Carol North's Welcome, silence
Falling into grace : Lauren Slater's Spasm : a memoir with lies
6. Engendering dissent in the underworld. Gender dynamics in the descent to Hell ; Inside the hero's descent : Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills
Hell and utopia : Marge Piercy's Woman on the edge of time
Dante upside-down: Alice Notley's The descent of Alette
7. Postmodern Hell and the search for roots. Karl Marx's katabasis ; Postmodern capitalist Hell : Alasdair Gray's Lanark
Lanark's search for roots ; Can realism lead to fantasy out of Hell? Can fantasy help realism?
8. East-West descent narratives. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse now and Western descents to the East ; Salman Rushdie's disoriented subjects ; The migrations of Orpheus in five acts : Rushdie's The ground beneath her feet : Threshold crossing ; Ground zero ; Looking back ; Dismemberment ; Return of another
Epilogue : Katabasis in the twenty-first century, September 11th : the first circle ; Afghanistan and Iraq : there and back again (again) ; Global fear and its inversions
Appendix : Primo Levi, 'Map of reading'.
