Considering this unsettled context might help us to understand why Whitehead, a MacArthur fellow and a celebrated literary stylist, would write a zombie novel. Nevertheless, the desire to imagine and model the future persists. More broadly, the precarious nature of contemporary human existence has led Eugene Thacker to assert that many thinkers and artists have been drawn to the tropes of horror and the apocalyptic because “he world is increasingly unthinkable” (1). is currently in an era in which “what will come next seems increasingly unimaginable” (186). This uncertainty stems from the tension between the pervasiveness of futurism in political and economic discourses and a heightened sense of the precariousness of human existence. The problem of ending is especially fraught in contemporary American literature because the present moment is characterized by historiographical uncertainty. Colson Whitehead’s narrative of the zombie apocalypse, Zone One, is a metafictional reflection on apocalyptic narrative conventions, particularly the question of ending.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |