Blog Prompts for Nuclear Futures Course, due by March 6 (Group B)

Choose one of the following options:

1. Discuss the formal strategies employed by Ōta Yōko and Christa Wolf in their literary accounts of nuclear catastrophe. What effects/affects do these strategies produce? How do they pose a challenge to and/or facilitate our comprehension of the unfathomable catastrophes of Hiroshima and Chernobyl respectively?
2. John Treat writes, “To ‘remember’ the future may seem a contradiction, but of course it is always the past that governs the terms of our anterior speculation” (1). Consider the temporalities engaged by Ōta and/or Wolf in their texts, examining how they represent or trouble nuclear futures specifically. Your answer might also draw connections to our theoretical readings on futurity from week four.
3. In illuminating the precarious ground on which atomic-bomb memory, imagination, and literary production is founded, John Treat posits, “In the narrowest sense a strictly ‘historical’ atomic-bomb literature is the accumulation of fact, of details, within the formats of first-person accounts and scientific reports. But beyond the simple massing and enumeration of facts lies a quality of factuality. Beyond what is literally true lies what could have been true, which is to say the more recognizably ‘literary’ products of a fact-governed imagination. This may be what Toyoshima Yoshio had in mind when, only weeks after the bombing, he insisted that literature must be ‘truth’ (shinjitsu), but that truth is not equivalent to ‘fact’ (jijitsu)” (34). How do issues and concerns about truthfulness, believability, lies, and fabrication present in Ōta Yōko and/or Hayashi Kyōko’s works? How do these writers, and Treat, trouble or address the concept of “knowing” or “understanding” atomic atrocities?