Keeping the lights on: post-apocalyptic narrative, social critique, and the cultural politics of emotion

2011 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis considers the ideological representations housed in post-apocalyptic narratives. These narratives, which are stories that take place after The End of the world, are examined in-depth as a way to begin theorizing about what kinds of cultural artifacts pass from contemporary times through the apocalyptic event, and what their ideological transmogrification or stability suggests about which discourses are legitimated in the culture from which these texts emerge. I label these leftovers "post-apocalyptic remains," and argue that their cruciality to the existence and operation of post-apocalyptic narrative invites us to consider how they constitute and articulate discursive statements, in the Foucauldian sense of the word. I identify three categories of post-apocalyptic remains: material items, cultural knowledge, and rituals. Material items are physical, tangible goods that audiences will recognize as having come from contemporary times. Cultural knowledge is a broader, more fluid category that encompasses overt ideological beliefs, language, morality, and other identifiable aspects of thought or belief. Ritual post-apocalyptic remains reference modes of action, often drawn from the everyday, such as before-meal rituals, capitalist consumption rituals, and the ritualistic control of delinquent bodies. I use a poststructuralist lens, drawing from Foucault and Grossberg to explicate how post-apocalyptic narrative articulates and legitimates discursive formations of thought. Additionally, I rely on Derrida and Jameson, who argue that stories about the future and about the apocalypse are strictly textual, and reflect current sociopolitical conditions rather than attempting to prophetically envision the future. I identify social critique and the circulation of emotion, drawing from Ahmed, as two relatively stable points of entry in theorizing post-apocalyptic remains in their culturally situated context. Social critique can often help explain which of the various sociopolitical conditions these stories are emerging out of. Emotion, when conceived of as culturally political, brings discussion of the audience into the analysis and explores more ideological themes. I use three contemporary texts as case studies to explore my arguments: The 2008 film WALL•E, the 2006 novel The Road and its 2009 film adaptation, and the 2006 novel The Book of Dave. Each of these texts represents a different attitude towards both emotion and social critique, and each of them is widely consumed by millions. Also, each text is unique in its use of post-apocalyptic remains, which is useful for rounding out the discussion of their roles in post-apocalyptic narratives. Overall, I argue that post-apocalyptic remains, as a crucial constituent of post-apocalyptic narrative, articulate the social critique and emotion in ways that allude to the purely textual nature of the apocalypse in order to situate stories about after The End within discursively-bound context