The Dark, Dead Corners of the Earth:The Imaginary of the Antarctic as “Deserta”
While the word ‘desert’ routinely conjures the elemental imagery of heat and light, technically speaking the Antarctic is the largest desert on the planet. Graulund’s chapter starts out with a general explorative and intellectual history of the Antarctic and contrasts it with the Arctic, which has a...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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Routledge
2024
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| Online Access: | https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/publications/3e7fca31-ac57-4862-a9d4-37d0982c3a47 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003397212 |
| Summary: | While the word ‘desert’ routinely conjures the elemental imagery of heat and light, technically speaking the Antarctic is the largest desert on the planet. Graulund’s chapter starts out with a general explorative and intellectual history of the Antarctic and contrasts it with the Arctic, which has a very different conceptual as well as colonial history. On the basis of this comparative assessment of the poles, Graulund reads a range of SF texts and films—from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land that Time Forgot (1924) to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)—in which Antarctic landscapes are envisioned as otherworldly, inhuman, and alien. The Antarctic can thus be seen as exemplary of how Western culture has simultaneously regarded deserts as void and teeming with imaginative life. |
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