Category: 53.1

Review of The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination

Jack Durant

Philip Ball. The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination. Chicago UP, 2021. Hardcover. 426 pg. $30.00. ISBN 9780226719269.

In The Modern Myths: Adventures in the Machinery of the Popular Imagination, Philip Ball argues that “the Western world has, over the past three centuries or so, produced narratives that have as authentic a claim to mythic status as the psychological dramas of Oedipus, Medea, Narcissus, and Midas” (3). These stories, “which everyone knows without having to go to the trouble” of reading them, have “seeped into our consciousness, replete with emblematic visuals, before we reach adulthood” (2). Modern myths—of which Ball identifies seven, starting with Robinson Crusoe and ending with Batman—are not, despite their origins in specific texts, so much singular narratives as “evolving web[s] of many stories—interweaving, interacting, contradicting each other”—but with one thing in common: “a rugged, elemental, irreducible kernel charged with the magical power of generating versions of the story” (9). This fecund capacity to produce new narratives is what allows these myths to do their “cultural work”: they “erect a rough-hewn framework on which to hang our anxieties, fears and dreams” (16).

This summary suggests the level of analysis the book sustains: this is not a theoretical study or ideological critique of myth, along the lines of Roland Barthes’s classic Mythologies (1957) or the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (critics mentioned only a half-dozen times, mostly in passing). Rather, The Modern Myths is an old-fashioned literary anatomy, in the mold of John Cawelti’s classic Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). What the book lacks in terms of theoretical claims it more than makes up for with its detailed close readings and rich historical contextualizations. Seven long chapters carefully lay out Ball’s mythic archetypes: Crusoe, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, Martian invaders (à la Wells’s War of the Worlds), Sherlock Holmes, and Batman. As this list suggests, the coverage is heavy on British, mostly Victorian, examplars, a bias Ball seems a bit defensive about, though he argues effectively that the “British character of much of the modern mythopoeia” has led to an emphasis in modern pop culture on themes of class and empire (20). Ball’s mythic canon is also exclusively male (though the origin text of the Frankenstein myth was written by a woman), and it is unclear why he did not select a female archetype to analyze, since pop culture is filled with compelling femmes fatales, such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Rider Haggard’s Ayesha. Perhaps Ball felt that this tradition was too diverse, not focused on a singular figure. In any case, he is quite frank about the biases informing his pantheon, and the individual chapters searchingly explore the cultural implications of the Anglophone and masculinist orientation of these various myths.

Each of the seven chapters devoted to a specific myth takes basically the same form. First, Ball traces the origins of the figure to a particular work of literature (or core collection of stories, as in the case of Sherlock Holmes) that has been abidingly popular. Yet, as he shows, the development of the myth over time has involved a process of adaptation and mutation that leaves the author’s intent far behind. A myth, Ball asserts, “is not identical to its founding text”; rather, myths “are the work of a culture” (14). The figures that have proven enduringly resonant are those reducible to key kernels of meaning that can be elaborated and adjusted over and over again. In the case of Frankenstein, for example, that kernel is the potential for Promethean overreaching built into the modern scientific enterprise, the possibility that “knowledge injudiciously applied” might “generate an entity too large and unruly to control” (129). Having thus distilled down the original text, Ball then pursues the pop-cultural career of this kernel or theme over decades of cultural production, from direct adaptations (e. g. James Whale’s classic 1931 film of Frankenstein) to various offshoots and allusions (e. g.. stories about rampaging robots and disobedient computers). These seven chapters are marked by extensive primary research and imaginative extrapolation, and Ball writes with an easy grace that is refreshingly free of jargon.

The volume concludes with two chapters that pan back from a focus on specific myths to offer more sweeping speculations about the nature of the “mythic mode” and the possibility of new myths emerging. These final chapters are somewhat less sure-footed, in part because they are so speculative; thus, Ball argues that the zombie may be an emergent myth, the first to be generated by the cinema rather than by a literary text—an assertion that, on the one hand, tends to ignore the literary lineage of the modern zombie (cf. Roger Luckhurt’s Zombies: A Cultural History [2015]), while on the other hand slighting mythic figures that are even more deeply rooted in a filmic corpus, such as the hardboiled private eye of modern noir. The capping chapter on the “mythic mode” of storytelling is a hodgepodge of tentative conclusions that is too short (barely 10 pages) to offer a synoptic perspective encompassing the diverse archetypes that the earlier chapters have spent so much time exploring (the chapter on Dracula alone runs almost 60 pages). It is these seven long chapters that form the core of Ball’s book, and they are all solid, well-researched, and unfailingly interesting studies that any student of modern pop culture will have much to learn from.

Jack Durant is a long-time reviewer of SF literature and criticism. He was a stalwart of the late Fantasy Review magazine and published a number of reviews in The Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Review Annual. 

Review of Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life

Mattia Petricola

Steven Shaviro. Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life. Goldsmiths Press, 2021. Hardcover. 192 pg. $24.95. ISBN 9781912685882.

According to its author, Extreme Fabulations is “a thought experiment” (1). More precisely, this experiment unfolds as an attempt to establish a dialogue between science fiction and the hermeneutical tools developed by modern and contemporary philosophy. Thus, Extreme Fabulations further develops the lines of inquiry that Shaviro inaugurated in his 2016 monograph Discognition. However, whereas Discognition explored the notions of consciousness, thought, and sentience, Extreme Fabulations focuses—as the title suggests—on how we can conceptualise, perceive, and reimagine the very idea of “life.” Shaviro’s argument starts from a compelling definition of science fiction as “counter-actual” rather than “counter-factual,” in the sense that “it offers us a provisional and impossible resolution, suspended in potentiality, of dilemmas and difficulties that are, themselves, all too real” (2). An “extreme fabulation” can thus be seen—even if Shaviro does not provide a clear definition of this expression—as a narrative that pushes the limits of our understanding of what “life” is while tackling the dilemmas that spring from this cultural and cognitive reconfiguration.

Each of the eight chapters that make up Extreme Fabulations investigates such dilemmas through an in-depth study of a single work of science fiction. More specifically, Shaviro provides close readings of Charles Harness’ 1950 short story “The New Reality”(chapter 1), Adam Roberts’ 2015 novel The Thing Itself (chapter 2), Clifford Simak’s 1953 short story “Shadow Show” (chapter 3), Ann Halam’s 2002 novel Dr. Franklin’s Island (chapter 4), Nalo Hopkinson’s 2005 short story “Message in a Bottle” (chapter 5), Chris Beckett’s 2012 novel Dark Eden (chapter 6), a 2016 concept album by the hip hop group clipping. entitled Splendor and Misery (chapter 7), and Gwyneth Jones’ 2017 novella Proof of Concept (chapter 8). Since each chapter is a perfectly self-contained whole that can be read independently from the others, Extreme Fabulations resembles an essay collection rather than a monograph. The presence of a conclusion would have probably made Shaviro’s argument somewhat better-rounded; on the other hand, the book’s structure makes it easily accessible to scholars and students who are specifically interested in one or more fictional works among those examined by Shaviro.

Chapters 1 and 2 focus on what Shaviro calls “Kantian science fiction” (21), that is, on works that defy the ontology of life (in other words, the conceptualisation of what life is) as elaborated by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). “The New Reality” and The Thing Itself provide Shaviro with an opportunity for discussing the difficult and somewhat marginal position of ontology in contemporary thought (which devotes much more attention to phenomenology and epistemology) and, more importantly, for exploring how science fiction can allow us to “poke around outside” (29) the categories that, according to Kant, structure human cognition and perception.

Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus to science as a Foucauldian power-knowledge system and to how it conceptualises, controls, and policies life. Shaviro’s readings of “Shadow Show”and Dr. Franklin’s Island represent valuable contributions to both posthuman theory and monster theory, since they investigate how science fiction can thematise and challenge our conception(s) of the human. Shaviro is particularly interested in how the two texts shatter the old vitalist view of life as a ‘spark’ in favour of a non-anthropocentric view of life as a pervasive process of animation involving both human and non-human beings, as wells as in how they deconstruct the idea of the ‘great chain of being’ while moving towards an anti-hierarchical and networked conception of life.

In chapters 5 and 6, the ‘dilemma’ of life is approached from the perspectives of aesthetics and anthropology. Shaviro’s study of “Message in a Bottle”—an Afrofuturist story about an art exhibition that will take place in the storyworld’s remote future—is centred on the idea of futurity and interrogates how we can conceive of life as something that extends beyond the present and into a future that can be imagined, questioned, and colonised. Dark Eden, on the other hand, is read as a work of “speculative anthropology” (116). In his analysis, Shaviro discusses the notion of ‘speculation’ by comparing its applications in science fiction and in evolutionary psychology, ultimately arguing that the former are far richer and more complex than the latter.

Chapters 7 and 8 draw from the arguments developed in the previous chapters and apply them to the speculative representation of social oppression. More specifically, Shaviro interprets the narrative developed in the album Spendor and Misery in the light of Kim Stanley Robinson’s notion of ‘anti-anti-utopia’, thus arguing that “it is better […] to ’set up a random course’ into the unknown than to stay with what is reliably oppressive and deadly” (147). The study of Proof of Concept finally interrogates the continued presence of capitalist realism in a future society and how speculative fiction can imagine alternative scenarios in a world that cannot be reformed.

Throughout his essays, Shaviro consistently adopts a twofold argumentative strategy. The fictional texts chosen as case studies are both compared with earlier science/speculative fiction narratives and read in the light of specific concepts drawn from modern or contemporary philosophy. Extreme Fabulations thus deploys an extensive hermeneutical toolkit ranging from the aforementioned Kant’s Critique and Foucault’s biopower to Quentin Meillassoux’s correlationism and Maurice Blanchot’s limit-experiences, from Eugene Thacker’s notion of ‘dark pantheism’ to Deborah Levitt’s concept of ‘animal apparatus,’ from the speculative realist philosophy of Graham Harman to Lee Edelman’s queer theory. This toolkit is further enriched by the presence of notions derived from physics (Einstein, Schrödinger, and two interpretations of quantum mechanics), biology, and finance. This complex theoretical framework, however, never makes the reader feel overwhelmed. No in-depth knowledge of philosophy is required to enjoy the essays, and every new concept is introduced with clarity and conciseness. As regards the comparison with other works of science/speculative fiction, one of the aspects that makes reading Extreme Fabulations from cover to cover particularly compelling is the fact that it proposes, in a series of arguments disseminated throughout the book, many elements for what could be called an anti-Lovecraftian monster theory. More specifically, this theory aims to demonstrate that “[i]f we want to get away from anthropocentrism […] we need to give up our Lovecraftian visions of the implacable coldness, emptiness, and unconcern of the universe” (38).

To sum up, Extreme Fabulations provides a stimulating and refreshingly original perspective on the conceptualisation of life in science fiction that will offer new ideas and lines of inquiry to both students and scholars working on science fiction, the posthuman, and monster theory. It would be fascinating, for example, to further explore the idea of ‘Kantian science fiction’ and find other works that might fit this category, or to understand how Shaviro’s arguments could be adapted to media other than literature and music and to works outside the anglophone world.

Mattia Petricola received his PhD in comparative literature in 2019 from the University of Bologna and has been a postdoc research fellow in comparative literature at the University of L’Aquila (Italy). His research interests sit at the crossroads of speculative/fantastic fiction, thanatology, intermedial studies, and queer theory. He has published articles on Philip K. Dick, Peter Greenaway, the notion of spectrality in media studies, and queer theory. In 2021 he edited a dossier entitled What do we Talk about when we Talk about Queer Death? for Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies.

Review of New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror

Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres

Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickinbottom, and Jonathan Wroot, eds. New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror. U of Wales P, 2021. Horror Studies. Paperback. 288 pg. $60. ISBN 9781786836342. eBook ISBN 9781786836359.

New Blood is a collection of essays examining recent works of horror film. Separated into four parts, the book largely acts as a defense for analyzing new horror films through a scholarly lens. Some of the essays are invested in reception studies and production methods, while others engage more in theory and interpretive analyses. Ultimately, many of the chapters seem to fall short of the book’s intent, functioning more as an elevated film review than a work of serious scholarship. However, many chapters would be effective in teaching undergraduate classes in horror so could be included on syllabi for such courses.

The editors present a kind of defense of modern horror cinema as worthy of critical study in their introduction. What struck me here was that the defense was framed as a list of horror films, claiming that there have been both remakes and original films, an argument that generally should go without saying. Indeed, the editors seem to try to defend whythe genre is popular more than why it is worthy of scholarly attention. We constantly see phrases such as, “some horror franchises have proven so popular that…” and “To understand the genre’s enduring popularity…” (2, 3). The introduction continues to state the obvious: “Critical acclaim has been given in many cases – but whether praised or derided, horror has carried on regardless” (4). As a result of this set-up, it seems very unclear who the audience for the book really is. People who think horror stopped being a film genre in the 90s? Beginning horror scholars who are looking for definitive proof that the genre is indeed popular? After defining what the editors call “revisionist horror” (5) and talking further about the commercial aspects of the genre, they outline the various case studies of the book.

In “Apprehension Engine: The New Independent ‘Prestige Horror,’” David Church engages with “artsy” horror of the past couple of decades through the label “prestige horror” (16), discussing the sub-genre in terms of reception studies, critical acclaim, and cultural studies. What is compelling about Church’s arguments is his discussions of indie “alternative” prestige films and the ways that many horror fans appreciate the art and poetry of films over the commercial scare factor. My greatest concern with Church’s work is the limit of his scope. What he calls indie-art films are reasonably commercial successes as well, such as It Follows (2014), Saw (2003), and The Witch (2015). There does not appear to be much room for horror shorts on YouTube or the much more indie films released only on Shudder.

The next essay, by Steve Jones, “Hardcore Horror: Challenging the Discourses of ‘Extremity,’” seeks to give definition to the eponymous terms “hardcore horror” and “extremity.” Jones focuses on market and critical definitions for “extremity,” noting that a store’s willingness to stock a horror film contributes to the market definition, as an example. The strength of this chapter is in its ability to give several specific cases, such as mother! (2017) and A Serbian Film (2010), while also acknowledging and giving room to the slippages of meaning of “extremity.” Even tackling a bias toward extreme horror texts in academic publishing, Jones approaches the concept from so many angles I could see myself easily teaching this chapter alone alongside some horror films.

Continuing the focus on specific audiences, Xavier Mendik approaches cult horror festivals in “From Midnight Movies to Mainstream Excess.” Mendik blends the personal with the critical effectively as he situates his experiences with a university horror film festival in the larger commercial industry of horror film. Like Church, Mendik is invested in terms like “prestige” and “success,” although his scope is limited more narrowly to these specific film festivals.

Starting the book’s second section, Joe Hickinbottom’s “A Master of Horror?: The Making and Marketing of Takashi Miike’s Horror Reputation” is more of a fan’s defense of Miike as a “horror auteur” than a work of serious critical inquiry. It even goes so far as to answer the titular question in just the first couple of pages, rendering the rest of the chapter uninteresting. This chapter might have been better placed as an introduction to a volume just on Miike. Asian horror continues with “Bloody Muscles on VHS: When Asia Extreme Met the Video Nasties” by Jonathan Wroot. Easily one of the sharpest chapters in the book, Wroot’s conducts a reception studies and comparatist reading of J-horror film Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell (2014). What impressed me with this chapter was the vast amount of research Wroot conducted: into VHS production history, the trends of VHS nostalgia in the 21st century, and the theory behind J-horror’s reception.

Thinking about film in the 21st century, one, of course, cannot forget the popularity of streaming services like Netflix, as Matt Hills notes in “Streaming Netflix Original Horror: Black Mirror, Stranger Things, and Datafied TV Horror.” Like Wroot, Hills brings in considerable theory, focusing on postmodern readings of what he calls the “flagships” of “datafied horror” (125): Stranger Things and Black Mirror. He excels at analyzing concepts unique to Netflix, discussing “bingeing on fear” and the distinctions of genre bubbles that separate Netflix from something specifically geared toward horror fans like Shudder (130).

The next part, focused on subgenres of modern horror, begins with Jessica Balanzategui’s chapter, “The digital gothic and the Mainstream Horror Genre: Uncanny Vernacular Creativity and Adaptation.” Balanzategui is invested in exploring the collaborative efforts that go into Creepypasta stories and the gothic elements that appear in them. This chapter would be really beneficial for introductory students of horror, showing them that even those stories they read online “count” as genuine literature. However, I wish Balanzategui integrated more Gothic theory and scholarship into the chapter, making that bridge between academic theory and popular fiction more apparent. Abigail Whitall envisions “rethinking subgenres and cycles” in “Nazi Horror, Reanimated” (167). In this chapter, Whitall makes the basic argument that Nazi horror should be considered a subgenre rather than a cycle. While convincing, the argument seems very simple and easily defensible to scholars who would be reading this book.

The final subgenre explored is the “desktop film” in “Digital Witness: Found Footage and Desktop Horror as Post-cinematic experience,” by Lindsay Hallam. In discussing the subgenres of found footage films here, Hallam integrates not only directors’ quotations but actually really strong affect theory and social media theory, making the chapter shine for its integration of scholarship alongside its analysis of primary texts. This chapter could serve as the basis of an entire course syllabus. Eddie Falvey then discusses feminine monstrosity in “Revising the Female Monster: Sex and Monstrosity in Contemporary Body Horror.” When I first read the chapter, I was frustrated with its survey nature. I had hoped there would be something more in-depth here. However, the chapter excels at being just that: a captivating survey. This chapter would be great for undergraduates to read, as it opens up many compelling conversations about sex, gender, disability, and even STDs in horror.

The political theme continues with Thomas Joseph Watson’s “The Kids are Alt-Right: Hardcore Punk, Subcultural Violence and Contemporary American Politics in Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room.” Green Room (2015) is certainly a horror film worthy of academic analysis. However, aside from the occasional quotation here and there, this chapter felt like an extended film review that summarized what a lot of other critics have said about the film. The last chapter is “Twenty-first-century Euro-snuff: A Serbian Film for the Family,” by Neil Jackson. In contrast to the previous chapter, this one thrives on literary theory to analyze a film that many would dismissively call “torture porn.” Jackson relies on affect theory and allegorical interpretations to derive new meaning from the film. The film thus becomes a site of investigation and critical inquiry that opens the way for other scholars (whether they are established researchers or undergraduates).

On the whole, the book seems conflicted. Half of it consists of simple arguments such as, “This is a film I enjoy, and here’s why,” and “This film is popular”; the other half actually engages in productive film theory and academic discourse. For those strong chapters, I would highly recommend the book to instructors teaching undergraduate horror courses. Those chapters really open the floor for productive discussions of the genre and showcase what that kind of horror analysis can look like.

Jonathan Thurston-Torres (they/them) is a PhD candidate at Michigan State University, specializing in Animal Studies, early modern literature, and horror literature. Their work has led them to edit MSU’s new volume in The Animal Turn series, Animals & Race. Outside of their academic work, they are a local activist in HIV destigmatization, recently putting out a TEDx Talk, Being Positive.

Review of Fantasies of Time and Death

Maria K. Alberto

Anna Vaninskaya. Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Hardback. 262 pg. $159.99. ISBN 9781137518378.

Anna Vaninskaya’s Fantasies of Time and Death is nothing short of a remarkable achievement: reading it, I could see immediately why it won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in 2021. In this monograph, Vaninskaya ably draws together three major authors whose works are not often compared at such length, and she explores how each uses fantasy—a complex, retroactive term that she does not take for granted, either—to explore “shared thematic preoccupations” (4) regarding “temporality, mortality and eternity: with process, event and state” (7). Such a project entails in-depth knowledge of three dense, elaborate bodies of work, as well as the capacity to draw, discuss, and compare relevant details from each one, but Vaninskaya does this spectacularly. Moreover, her writing style is richly poetic—and frankly, gorgeous—in ways that academic scholarship does not often allow itself to be, and the end result is a work that feels thematically and technically well-matched with its subjects.

In a move that could have been risky, but that Vaninskaya pulls off very well, Fantasies of Time and Death opens right on the knotty topic of canon creation, reviewing how reader demand and publisher choices both played a critical role in the creation of fantasy as a genre, well after these three authors’ own times. Beginning here offers important historical context and demystification, and further strengthens Vaninskaya’s reasoning to group Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, and J.R.R. Tolkien on the basis of shared textual preoccupations: specifically, their various interests in “cosmopoiesis… the creation myth… [and] a multi-generic universe” (7) rather than the kinds of cohesive narrative more typical among both their predecessors and peers. The remainder of this introduction offers more focused introductions to each author and his oeuvre, then looks briefly to other writers now considered fundamental to the fantasy genre before returning to that shared interest in transience, time, and death.

Following this introduction, Vaninskaya offers a chapter apiece focused on the works, interests, and approaches of Dunsany, Eddison, and Tolkien. With Lord Dunsany, she calls attention to how he saw himself as a poet writing “a species of prose poetry” (25), which led to a “patterning impulse” (26) evident across his shorter works in particular. Subsections in this chapter are devoted to, variously, the ravages of time, the chill of space, and the uncertainty of the universe, as depicted in Dunsany’s fantasy. Across these three axes, Vaninskaya maintains, Dunsany’s fictional worlds are “literally a-gnostic. There are no epiphanies, no ultimate truths, the mythology is an anti-revelation” (44), and divine power may be glimpsed but is never fully explicated or revealed. Oftentimes, she contends, these preoccupations connect Dunsany’s works more than any shared fictional setting or returning cast of characters.

Next, Vaninskaya turns to a chapter on E.R. Eddison, and specifically his complex, unfinished Zimiamvia trilogy, in which multiple characters are incarnations of the male and female parts of God, most unaware of their divine identities. Pointing out how this work is driven by “intertextual and interlingual bricolage” (69), Vaninskaya maintains that—despite the vast universe visible here and the multifaceted pantheon driving it—readers must be willing to wade through reams of uncredited quotations and ideas. These extend well beyond poetic and prose allusions, on into a deep preoccupation with seventeenth-century philosophy: Eddison, Vaninskaya demonstrates, engages with paradoxes of God’s existence and perfection as set out by Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz (115). And while the full intricacies of these readings will be at least partly lost upon those not familiar with Eddison’s sprawling work, Vaninskaya does an admirable job of summarizing this complex trilogy and drawing readers’ attention to its most startling features, whether philosophical, theological, or genre-driven.

And from here we come to the chapter that first drew my attention to Vaninskaya’s work: her discussion of Tolkien. Because Fantasies of Time and Death is not a survey, but instead looks to the foundation of each author’s oeuvre, Vaninskaya focuses here not on Tolkien’s most famous work The Lord of the Rings (1954), but instead on the natures and fates of Elves and Men as developed across his entire legendarium. Thus, this chapter deals primarily with the collection of stories, some published posthumously, called The Silmarillion, and draws specifically from the Ainulindalë (creation account of the world that includes Middle-earth), the Athrabeth (philosophical exchange between a human woman and an Elven prince), and the Akallabêth (the story of the island kingdom Númenor). Vaninskaya revisits these particular portions of Tolkien’s legendarium to argue that knowledge of time and death differs according to Elves and Men, and in fact, becomes a sort of “psychological trauma” when the world’s ultimate antagonist Melkor spreads corrupted information about them (164). Some of the connections that Vaninskaya draws outward from Tolkien’s work, such as to Augustine and Aquinas for the Catholic doctrine of mankind’s “happy fault” (173), have been more well-trod in existing scholarship than others, but overall, her discussion here is still fresh and fascinating.  

Despite their evocative prose and obvious expertise, there are a few stumbling blocks to these chapters. For one thing, the authors they are dealing with can be challenging in their own right: though each one might, as Vaninskaya suggests, be creating a single, genre-spanning universe in their fiction, the coherency and accessibility of these various universes differ quite widely. Dunsany creates a variety of short works that may or may not reference one another directly; Eddison is author of a grand, sprawling trilogy that remained unfinished at his death; and Tolkien’s work is scattered across several drafts, many of them organized by his son and published posthumously in an attempted semblance of Tolkien’s larger plans. Vaninskaya herself switches between multiple texts with commendable, indeed enviable, ease, but does not always signal her intent when doing so, which could leave readers less familiar with those texts lost in a sea of references. Even this is not entirely a criticism, though, because she has a knack for summarizing and drawing out relevant pieces from these complex writings that will carry readers along regardless. All told, Vaninskaya’s work is a commendable undertaking. It can be a dense read, and one that will be made significantly more difficult without some knowledge of the source works; but it is absolutely worth it all the same.

Maria K. Alberto is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Utah, where she is currently working on her dissertation examining canons in popular culture texts. Her research interests include digital storytelling, transformative fanworks, and genre literature of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. She has written several pieces on Tolkien and adaptations of his legendarium. 

Review of The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Nathaniel P. Doherty

Rachel Swirsky. January Fifteenth. Tordotcom, 2022. Paperback. 239 pg. $15.99. ISBN 978-1-250-19894-6.

The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel: Critical Temporalities and the End Times, by Diletta De Cristofaro, is encyclopedic in its approach to contemporary Anglophone literature. At its center of critical focus is the engagement of contemporary Anglophone fiction of the U.S., Canada, and Great Britain with the logic of apocalypse. De Cristofaro traces this oppressive logic deftly from Biblical roots to every bud of current dominant power structures. This book is the author’s first monograph in an otherwise extensive body of work, and she uses this opportunity to cast a wide, interdisciplinary net of referenced fiction around the foci of each chapter. Each chapter focuses on one high profile novel and one that is under-recognized, according to De Cristofaro.

The novel theoretical insight offered by De Cristofaro is “critical temporality” (De Cristofraro 1). In short, critical temporality is a feature whereby texts contradict or otherwise undermine apocalyptic conceptions of time. De Cristofaro identifies this critical mode as a resistance to, or commentary upon, legacies of traditional Christian apocalypticism, especially as it has been appropriated by a range of oppressive and/or exploitative systems dominating global policy and popular ways of knowing. The introduction sketches out critical temporality and establishes the monograph’s critical underpinning. It also provides a brief but useful introduction to the history of apocalyptic narratives in Western culture.

Chapter One focuses on Sam Taylor’s The Island at the End of the World (2009) and The Book of Dave (2006), by Will Self. In both texts, apocalypse functions to justify, after the fact, theocratic systems that are both misogynist and sexist. In both texts, in different ways, the theocracies are all but immune to reform or escape because of their deployment of sanctity as a means to control both public narrative and history. The novels’ critical temporality undermines these systems with parody. De Cristofaro’s critical lens is primarily occupied with a critique of oppressive, overt, Christian power structures.

Chapter Two focuses on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and The Pesthouse (2007),by Jim Crace. De Cristofaro analyzes what she refers to as “American ideologies,” specifically Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism, within these two novels’ narratives (14). Specifically, she identifies how these narratives invert the traditional mythology of the American ‘open road’ and the related narratives of limitless self-reinvention as their critical temporalities. The chapter also notes critiques of the ‘creative’ destruction inherent in the U.S.’s claims to correct and perfect European civilization.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) form the core of Chapter Three’s analysis. De Cristofaro focuses on the role played by apocalyptic logic in the post-facto justification and sustenance of exploitative colonialism and neo-colonialism. Both novels cover vast spans of fictional history. Linear narrative is associated in the chapter with Biblical, “Revelation”-style apocalypticism, and thus De Cristofaro focuses on non-linear narratives as the ‘critical temporalities’ of both novels. In both cases, narrative time becomes critical via textual reflections of nonfictional capitalist, (neo)colonial structures and histories. This chapter also contains the monograph’s closest consideration of eco-critical themes.

Chapter Four centers on variations of denarration in novels critiquing stagnation in neoliberalism’s framing of history. The central texts are Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014)and Douglas Coupland’s Player One (2010). De Cristofaro reads denarration and monotony in both as associating the apocalypse with symbols of global capitalism. More specifically, the chapter takes aim at claims that neoliberalism represents the ‘end of history.’ De Cristofaro spends more time on the initial contextual interpretations, which includes Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (2012). The modes of rendering temporality in the novels of this chapter are characterized by slowing, monotony, and variations of denarration that parody neoliberalism’s perpetual, changeless present.

The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel’s conclusion focuses on Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) and the employment of the body as a vehicle for historical narrative resisting official archives. The temporal dimension of this embodied archive constitutes this section’s approach to critical temporality through its opposition to the apocalyptic chronology of the official archive. De Cristofaro revises Derrida’s “Archive Fever” as a drive within post-apocalyptic fiction to imagine the preservation of narratives through the apocalypse (1995). She interprets these archives as evidence of the novelists’ faith in the power of narrative to resist contemporary tendencies driving towards global catastrophe, an implicit nod to speculative fiction’s preoccupation with extrapolation.

The critical lenses employed by De Cristofaro are feminist as well as postmodernist and post-structuralist. Further, a Marxist-inflected critique of global capitalism undergirds most of her interventions. Religious, or pseudo-religious, support for misogyny and sexism is a focus of the first chapter, and high-profile postmodernists or post-structuralists (there’s some debate about who counts as what) are cited directly in the introduction and referenced throughout. This grouping includes Baudrillard, Derrida, Haraway, Lyotard, and Linda Hutcheon, among others. Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) also makes an appearance when De Cristofaro turns towards eco-critical considerations. As a result, there is a case for identifying a post-humanist facet to De Cristofaro’s work as well.

This monograph is a valuable interdisciplinary intervention that provides a convincing and timely approach as well as detailed references to many texts capable of supporting a broad range of scholarship. The Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel has the potential to be a resource for scholars working on contemporary literature, posthumanism, gender studies, and eco-criticism, at least. Its contents are especially relevant to contemporary SF studies. De Cristofaro’s thorough catalogue of related texts in each chapter means the book itself functions like an archive. Thus, it has the potential to support a range of contemporary literature courses, given that most of the texts referenced transcend the dubious distinction between literary and speculative fiction. The Pesthouse section of Chapter Two is particularly notable for making extensive and interesting use of research into Crace’s personal papers stored at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austen. The use of the Crace papers provides an example of archival scholarship applicable to both undergraduate and graduate students. De Cristofaro has given us that rare work that functions on an advanced theoretical level while also nonetheless being applicable to many classroom contexts.

Nathaniel Doherty has worked as a writer, instructor, and etc. in many capacities throughout post-secondary education. Currently he works in instructional design at Chadron State College, in Chadron, NE. Technically, it’s still the frontier out here. Besides advocacy for learner-centered teaching, his professional focus is late-20^th and 21st-century U.S. fiction and gender studies. He has a predilection for genre writing.