Atomic Housewives: Shutter Island and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust
ABSTRACT: Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is one of several post–September 11 cultural texts that use Cold War settings to challenge the trend in US culture to displace social and political fears by escaping to a nostalgia for an idealized postwar society. The film ostensibly replaces the protagonist's wartime trauma with a domestic tragedy while simultaneously undermining that replacement. Its attempt to bury the guilt for war crimes under worries about the collapse of the nuclear family confronts the United States' attempt to justify its actions in the War on Terror through a nostalgic imaginary of the Cold War.
Islands of lost souls
Scorsese's "Shutter Island" may be a faithful adaptation of a bestseller, but it's also his deeply felt homage to the cinema of the 1940s and 50s, says Graham Fuller, and a return to the paranoid interior world of "Taxi Driver"
Philip Roth’s Great Books: A Reading of The Human Stain
Philip Roth belongs to the first generation of American novelists for whom a university education in the liberal arts was the norm. This essay charts Roth’s developing acquaintance with classical literature, the starting point for Great Books courses in the 1950s, and the implications for his fiction of his understanding of the difference in scope and purpose between the two representative classical genres. It focuses on The Human Stain (2000), the novel in which he reflects most directly upon what tragedy and epic once did, and what might happen to novels if they became more like the one or the other.