ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Sara Gruen's enormously popular Water for Elephants as the successor to Life of Pi but also, more importantly, to Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus. Gruen's enormously popular 2006 novel Water for Elephants follows Life of Pi in using an animal-centered fiction to explore questions of thanatopolitics. Written during the Iraq War years and set in the Great Depression, Water for Elephants gives a depiction of circus life that offers a questionable escape. Walter Benjamin's analysis of the baroque in The Origin of German Tragic Drama has been seen as relevant to three other historical moments, the last two of which belong to Carter and Gruen: Weimar Germany, postmodernity, and post-9/11 states of exception. The potential nuances of difference between Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben provides ways to think in turn, then, about the contrast between postmodern and post-9/11 aesthetics.
