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Exit Strategies: Narrative Closure and Political Allegory in Lost and Battlestar Galactica

Published/Copyright: March 15, 2014
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Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
From the journal Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Volume 60 Issue 4

Abstract

Thanks to technological developments that allow controlled, scheduleindependent, and repeated attentive viewing, dramatic television series have substantially increased narrative and thematic complexity, both within the individual episode and season, and within the multi-season arc. Lost and Battlestar Galactica, which opened with a single cataclysmic event determining their storyline over several seasons, did so by reflecting on the trauma of 9/11 and its long aftermath. Each series also spoke to the political question how long national identity can, or should, be determined by historical trauma, and in what manner this trauma itself is to be written into the national record. In their specific ways of aligning their own narrative closure with the Bush administrations’ exit from office in 2008, Lost and Battlestar Galactica pursued a historical allegory of transcending trauma and achieving national renewal.

Online erschienen: 2014-03-15
Erschienen im Druck: 2012-10

© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelei
  2. Inhalt
  3. Editorial
  4. Minds at War, Minds in War: The Wartime Short Fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis
  5. Analyzing Graphic Novels in Terms of Complexity: A Typology
  6. Painful Interactions: The Elusive Mother-Daughter Relationship in Alice Munro’s “The Peace of Utrecht”
  7. Exit Strategies: Narrative Closure and Political Allegory in Lost and Battlestar Galactica
  8. “It’s About Being Connected”: Reframing the Network in Colum McCann’s Post 9/11 Novel Let the Great World Spin
  9. Buchbesprechungen
  10. Bucheingänge
  11. Die Autoren dieses Heftes
https://doi.org/10.1515/zaa.2012.60.4.375

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Titelei
  2. Inhalt
  3. Editorial
  4. Minds at War, Minds in War: The Wartime Short Fiction of D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis
  5. Analyzing Graphic Novels in Terms of Complexity: A Typology
  6. Painful Interactions: The Elusive Mother-Daughter Relationship in Alice Munro’s “The Peace of Utrecht”
  7. Exit Strategies: Narrative Closure and Political Allegory in Lost and Battlestar Galactica
  8. “It’s About Being Connected”: Reframing the Network in Colum McCann’s Post 9/11 Novel Let the Great World Spin
  9. Buchbesprechungen
  10. Bucheingänge
  11. Die Autoren dieses Heftes
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