The Post-Apocalyptic Novel

Doomsday scenarios forecasting the end of civilization and the emergence of frightening dystopias have been with us since ancient times. But with the advent of the nuclear age in the twentieth century, the number of works in literature and film that envision the apocalypse and its aftermath has increased with every passing decade. Twenty-first century anxieties about environmental disasters; food, water, and energy shortages; pandemics and biological warfare; impact events; cyber attacks; financial meltdowns; and scientific experiments gone awry have spawned a veritable post-apocalyptic industry. Literary works in this genre typically grapple with four challenging issues: How will our world be destroyed? How do the survivors reconstruct society out of such enormous wreckage? Under conditions of extreme deprivation and fear, what truths do we discover about human nature and about what we value most, both as individuals and as social groups? What do such stories tell us about the role of power in the formation and sustainability of a society? The course considers a broad range of early and more recent post-apocalyptic works such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, Justin Cronin's The Passage, and Max Brooks' World War Z. We also examine three works of dystopian fiction in order to distinguish this subgenre from the post-apocalyptic: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis.