Spirit Don't Ever Die: Apocalypse and Denial in an Infinite Universe

<p>In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh catalogs contemporary fiction’s failure to adequately engage with catastrophic climate change. In this thesis, I argue the engagement problem has a century-old analogue in fiction’s approach to entropy. Entropy was among the first secular apocalyptic modes in mainstream discourse, and this investigation of authors’ approaches to its portrayal provides a model for understanding fiction’s denial or acceptance of apocalypse. I first examine William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land, a far-future tale set in a post-solar Earth. I contend that Hodgson’s centering of the human experience prevents him from portraying a true end and instead lends his work anti-apocalyptic energy. This centering seemingly stems from the nineteenth century episteme, as defined by Foucault, which privileged taxonomy as the guiding epistemological model. I then contrast The Night Land with two mid-century stories that more-fully reconcile entropic apocalypse, and which favor a networked “unit operations” approach as described by the contemporary theorist Ian Bogost. First, “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov envisions a cosmic resetting by framing the universe as protagonist. Second, “Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon looses full-scale entropy on humans both witting and unwitting, framing human consciousness and ultimately inconsequential. </p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts in English (MA)

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Year dc:date.available

2019

Author dc:creator

• Riggs, Nathan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hinrichsen, Lisa A.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Bailey, Constance R.
• Marren, Susan M.

• Apocalypse
• Ian Bogost
• Speculative Fiction
• The Night Land
• Unit Operations
• William Hope Hodgson
• Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority
• Modern Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/3347

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarworks.uark.edu:etd-4897