Abstract
From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated mainstream popular culture in the United States and worldwide in recent years. Reflecting on Fredric Jameson’s famous remark about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, this chapter suggests that the predominance of apocalyptic themes paradoxically discloses an effort to imagine the world system in its unrepresentable totality. Examining a number of recent films, it identifies three particular traits—clear temporal limits, an identifiable political order, and the desirable simplification of social complexes—that make possible a sort of political unconscious of dystopian cinema, which in turn becomes a way of understanding the seemingly chaotic world system itself.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
2012. 2009. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Columbia Pictures.
Adams, Sam. 2018. It’s the End of the World as We Know It, and Hollywood Feels Fine. Slate, June 22. https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/jurassic-world-fallen-kingdom-westworld-and-other-recent-blockbusters-embrace-apocalypse.html.
Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru (eds.). 2015. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley: Zero Books.
Frost, Robert. 1969. Fire and Ice. In The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, 220. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Grattan, Sean Austin. 2017. Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. Max Pensky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1988a. Cognitive Mapping. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–360. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
———. 1988b. Introduction. In The Ideologies of Theory Essays, 1971–1986, Vol. 1: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
———. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and the British Film Institute.
———. 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso.
———. 2008. Future City. In The Ideologies of Theory, 563–576. London: Verso.
Kermode, Frank. 1967. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moraru, Christian. 2015. Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
The Simpsons. 2015. Let’s Go Fly a Coot. Dir. Chris Clements and Mike B. Anderson. Fox Broadcasting, May 3.
Snowpiercer. 2013. Dir. Bong Joon Ho. CJ Entertainment.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.
Tally, Robert T., Jr. 2015. “Beyond the Flaming Walls of the World: Fantasy, Alterity, and the Postnational Constellation.” In The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru, 193–210. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
This Is the End. 2013. Dir. Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg. Columbia Pictures.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1994. The Spectre of Ideology. In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 1–33. London: Verso.
———. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tally Jr., R.T. (2019). The End-of-the-World as World System. In: Ferdinand, S., Villaescusa-Illán, I., Peeren, E. (eds) Other Globes. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14980-2_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14979-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14980-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)