Congratulations to Dr. Heather Hicks, whose timely chapter, "Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction," was just published in a collection of essays on Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture by Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Hicks's essay explores contemporary scholarship on apocalyptic fiction, noting that growing alarm about climate change has begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? She observes that many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their most compassionate after a catastrophe. In response to this tension, Dr. Hicks's essay takes a dialectical approach to understanding both the critical and reparative aspects of twenty-first-century American apocalyptic fiction. In the first half, it demonstrates that the violent mythmaking in this work is both symptomatic of the “elite panic” characterized by disaster studies and reflective of other decidedly American ideologies. The second half identifies how some of these same apocalyptic texts complicate or even counteract expectations of panic, theft, and violence, providing insights for how readers might cultivate cooperation and community in the wake of an apocalyptic event.
