Abstract

The ideological representations housed in one of the post-apocalyptic narratives are considered. A poststructuralist lens is used by drawing key points from Foucault (1972) and Grossberg (1992) to explicate how post-apocalyptic narrative articulates and legitimates discursive formations of thought. This article identifies social critique and the circulation of emotion, drawing from these theorists in drawing stable points of entry in theorizing post-apocalyptic traces in their culturally situated context. Social critique can often help explain which of the various sociopolitical conditions this story is emerging out of. Emotion, when conceived of as culturally political, brings discussion of the reader into the analysis and explores more ideological themes. The 2006 novel The Book of Dave represents a different attitude towards both emotion and social critique. Also, the 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, an argument is suggested that postapocalyptic traces, 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.

Authors and Affiliations