Shuffling Narratives: Apocalypticism, Postmodernism, and Zombies

Abstract

Zombies and the tropes that surround them have become a staple of popular culture and a familiar presence in movies, television series, graphic novels, and video games. From their Caribbean folklore origins, the undead are palimpsestic metaphors for social issues and cultural anxieties. This article examines the rarely studied tensions between apocalyptic desires to resurrect narrative stability through monstrous bodies and postmodern voices that utilize zombies to decompose societal conventions. Despite this supposed antagonism, the article suggests that zombies amalgamate these contrasting mindsets by assuming a role of pop-cultural mediators that bridge the gap between increasingly divisive cultural epistemologies.

Biographical Note

Dr. Steffen Adrian Wöll (SFB 1199 )

Employed at SFB 1199 since October 2016, I’ve contributed my American Studies background to a sub project, finishing with a dissertation titled “The West and the Word: Imagining, Formatting, and Ordering the American West in Nineteenth-Century Cultural Discourse.” Starting in 2020, I’m employed as a postdoctoral researcher in the follow-up project that involves the study of US transoceanic expansion between 1880-1940 and its representation and construction in literature and other cultural texts. These studies bring to the fore discursive dynamics and intersections between spatial imaginations of the transpacific and circum-caribbean spaces, as well as their connections at geo-strategic junctions such as the Panama Canal. Next to the analysis of spatial imaginations, formats, and orders, I’m interested in representations of agency, race, and otherness in US literature and culture. Articles about these and other subjects have appeared in several journals and volumes.