Irony and Catastrophe: War with Manybeast in the 1980s and Today
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | In the multiperspective War with Manybeast by Vladimír Páral, the ubiquitous pollution takes physical form, raining from dirty clouds and assembling into aggressive human-like formations with agency and intelligence. While humanity manages to fight it, its second stage permeating into human bodies and affecting its hosts’ character and mental capacities, is much more insidious. Infected people do not want to recover; content in the lazy consumerist haze, they are unwilling to endure hardship and employ the moral strength necessary for change and healing. The novel was read as a contemporary ecological and social critique, revealing practices of the totalitarian regime. However, the infectious manybeast is an apt metaphor for present consumerism and resistance to necessary green change. The paper aims to analyse the cognitive effects of the personification of the environmental crisis in the novel and through selected examples in today’s ecomedia. |
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