Negative Strategies and World Disruption in Postapocalyptic Fiction

This article engages with the challenges of narrating catastrophe in so-called postapocalyptic fiction, and more specifically in three contemporary novels that bring formal and stylistic sophistication to the genre: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011), and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). I claim that these novels are able to evoke a strong sense of the disrupted temporality of catastrophe through what I call “negative strategies.” These are formal devices that leverage the underlying psychological structure of negation in order to confront readers with the absence of the preapocalyptic world. My textual analyses are part of a broader attempt to understand how the imbrication of human and nonhuman realities (as revealed, in my corpus, by catastrophe) impacts narrative not just in thematic but in formal terms.