A utopian desire called dystopia: Analysing transnational projections of anti-capitalist futures in four post-apocalyptic television series

The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion

This chapter builds on the ways in which scholars and artists have considered 9/11 as a kind of apocalyptic event; in response, post-apocalyptic narratives, which had previously been inspired by the Cold War and Y2K, now squarely addressed terrorism and twenty-first-century militarization. Particularly in light of the Islamic State’s rhetoric about the long-foretold caliphate and the end of days, post-apocalyptic narratives offer a mode of examining the contemporary condition of constant war and its roots in ideological, economic, and religious difference. This chapter looks closely at the television series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), the film and book series The Hunger Games (2008–2015), and the CW television series The 100 (2014–present), examining the way they frame war and apocalypse as a repetitive cycle.

May landscape description be considered an eco-critical metaphor? This paper proposes a text analysis of two post-apocalyptic narratives, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as novel and movie, and the zombie drama The Walking Dead, as graphic novel and television series. Neither narrative provides an explanation for its apocalypse, or a direct warning as regards human environmental misbehaviour. But both the barren landscape described in the former work, and the renaturalizing one presented in the latter second may convey an environmental meaning, albeit in a different way. To evaluate the way in which contemporary audiences negotiate this, further research would be necessary.

One of the main functions of post-apocalyptic narratives is, arguably, to offer writers a compelling and convenient setting in which to discuss and enact alternative forms of society, often based on various existing ideologies, religions, or other systems of belief.Historically, these kinds of narratives have often been considered a typically British genre, and one of the most important writers in this tradition after the Second World War is John Wyndham (pen name for John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, 1903–1969), whose breakthrough novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) is one of the most widely read post-apocalyptic novels in the English language. It has been kept in print continually since the 1950s, and has been adapted numerous times (into radio dramas, television series, graphic novels, and a film).This chapter examines both the ways in which The Day of the Triffids demonstrates how post-apocalyptic narratives can be used to discuss alternative ways of organising a society and how the novel can be seen as addressing the contemporary predicament of post-war Britain, undergoing both decolonisation and rapid social change. Following the depiction of its infamous double disaster, most of the novel is in fact spent exploring various ideologies and their eventual shortcomings in a world which has experienced major changes. Moreover, John Wyndham is not often thought of as a particularly radical writer, and most of his writing after the Second World War was aimed mainly at the British middle class. A comparison, however, of the novel as published in the UK in 1951 with its oldest extant manuscript reveals some remarkable differences, ultimately highlighting the ideological content of The Day of the Triffids.

Affective disposition theory explains well the process of enjoying hero narratives but not the appeal of narratives featuring antiheroes. Recent antihero studies suggest that character identification and moral disengagement might be important factors in the enjoyment of such fare. The current study builds on this work. A sample of 101 self-identified fans and nonfans of the television series

This article considers Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy as an exemplar of the principle that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives often serve as vehicles for utopian hopes in anti-utopian historical moments. The trilogy expresses utopian possibilities through the procedures of negative utopianism: a set of discursive practices oriented toward utopian horizons but informed by the principle that utopia cannot be represented from a position within ideology. The Crakers and the God's Gardeners are the two utopian entities in the trilogy, and the social content attributed to them is generated through two qualitatively distinct approaches to utopian representation that Fredric Jameson has theorized using the Greimasian semiotic rectangle. Both entities fail, but the trilogy places utopian hope in the possibility for their combination, facilitated by an apocalyptic catastrophe that creates space in the world of the trilogy for alternative configurations of the social. These alternatives, however, are deferred beyond the trilogy's conclusion.

While postapocalyptic narratives are hardly new, American television networks produced a notable wave of early twenty-first-century programs like Jeremiah (Showtime, 2002–04), Jericho (CBS, 2006–08), The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–22), The Last Ship (TNT, 2014–18), Wayward Pines (Fox, 2015–16), and Revolution (NBC, 2012–14)—doomsday visions complemented by reality television “prepper” programs like The Colony (Discovery, 2009–10), Doomsday Preppers (National Geographic, 2011–14), and Doomsday Castle (National Geographic, 2013). These postapocalyptic and prepper television series use militarized images of hypermasculinity, gritty survivalist tropes, and remixed colonial wild west stereotypes in order to create stories congruent with a particularly conservative mode of patriarchal representation. Examining the origins of such narratives and the stereotypes they encourage constructs a window to a particular moment in American history—specifically, the renewed rise of populist, masculinist, heteronormative, and white supremacist movements. While the relationship between a society and its popular cultures is inherently cyclical, pinpointing a precise moment in postapocalyptic television’s evolution helps to situate it as a hegemonic tool that may serve to exacerbate or encourage “alt-right” attitudes toward marginalized groups.

This chapter uses Saussurean semiotics to explore how law is culturally defined through popular visual media and how these media representations contribute to wider understandings of both law’s functioning and its limitations. It profiles four signifiers of law in popular visual media: the father, the lawyer, the policeman and the vigilante and explores the relationship between them, analysing the impact each of these signifiers has on the corresponding signified of law and their connections to justice and the rule of law. The primary texts I will be looking at are the US television series Law & Order (NBC) and Dexter (Showtime) and the UK series Life on Mars (BBC). Following Bennett and Woollacott’s study (1987, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero. London: Methuen) these examples are supported by a deliberately wide-ranging series of secondary media texts, with some slippage between filmic and televisual texts, as any other approach runs the risk of being too limiting, abstracting texts from the wider culture which both elucidates their meaning and demonstrates how widespread these ideas of law truly are.

<p>In our contemporary period of crisis and flux, the ability to envisage and struggle for better modes of social being—i.e. utopianism—has seemingly never been more urgent, or more difficult. In this context, this thesis turns to the Marxist utopian tradition as a key resource for political hope, demonstrating both what was lost in the repudiation of Marxism and socialism at the ‘end of history,’ and identifying emergent forms of post-capitalist utopian desire within contemporary culture. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical and methodological framework of the thesis, bringing together a Gramscian approach to cultural analysis with Ernst Bloch’s expansive understanding of utopianism as a ubiquitous aspect of the social world, rooted in a view of historical materialism as itself a utopian methodology and tradition. On this approach, utopia becomes a lens for viewing culture, the cultural terrain suddenly animated by utopian currents, desires, and impulses. Chapters 2 and 3 give historical background for thinking (with) Marxist utopianism today: first, tracing the development of neoliberal and anti-communist common sense over the twentieth century, a successful ‘war of utopia’ culminating in the exile of Marxist utopianism from the social imaginary at the ‘end of history’; then revisiting Marxist socialist history, highlighting both the general utopian power of the existence of the socialist horizon, and the expansive heterogeneity of that horizon, exploring, in particular, Marxist visions of emancipated gender and sexual relations, and its decolonial and ecological currents. Chapters 4-6 utilise the thesis’ utopian optic to investigate the contemporary cultural and imaginative landscape, finding emergent forms of post-capitalist desire despite the weakness and fragmentation of contemporary left politics. Chapter 4 finds nascent anti-systemic and ecosocialist potential in today’s ‘end of the world’ structure of feeling; chapter 5 identifies, across the otherwise unrelated moments of new age trends and new romance texts, proto-socialist desires to transcend individualism; and chapter 6 investigates the impasses and utopian possibilities in the recent return of the socialist imaginary. Together, these constellations demonstrate not only the existence of post-capitalist utopian desire today, but also that this desire rests on quite simple visions of the good life—highlighting the loss of capitalism’s utopian signification in its contemporary crisis-ridden form, rarely any longer even feigning responsibility for the social good. Chapter 7 concludes by arguing that despite current objective conditions that often feel hopeless, there is good reason to maintain ‘militant optimism' today.</p>

In describing the power of Christian Marclay’s The Clock, Daniel Zalewski has written, “By presenting a day in the life as a ceaseless parade of fictional narratives, [Marclay] had confirmed Joan Didion’s dictum that ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live’ while reminding us that we are all going to die.” Appropriately enough, the final chapter of this study explores Anne Washburn’s musical drama Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play, which premiered in 2012, about a group of survivors of the fall of civilization recreating episodes of the long-running animated Fox television series The Simpsons. The play engages not only television but also film, music, theater, and popular culture in general, leveling the playing field of sources and adaptations in a post-apocalyptic setting. While it argues for the dire necessity of retelling stories in times of trauma, Mr. Burns avoids the fatalism implied in Zalewski’s comment; instead, the play imagines stories, including reframed ones, as creative forces that look forward instead of backward. Washburn’s play suggests the vital role adaptation can play in crafting a future in which our real and imagined worlds merge.

The 2014 novel Mr. Mercedes was billed (albeit incorrectly) by its author as well as his critics as his first hardboiled book. As a bestseller and the source material for a highly praised television series, the novel remains perhaps the most successful offering to date from the hardboiled Stephen King. The novel provides fertile ground for exploring the noir aspects of post-9/11 America: its seedy underbelly, rampant corruption, and chivalric posturing on the global stage. The chapter begins by surveying how King returns to certain hardboiled themes and tropes to reflect the liminal space between criminality and heroism in the contemporary United States in Mr. Mercedes as well as its offshoot Holly . These texts recycle the genre’s grammar in thought-provoking ways. They restore a certain color palate in its confrontation of American crises, such as a wave of white supremacists and a niggling sense of meaninglessness behind the soft glow of countless computer screens. King paints with nostalgic sepia tones and murky Venetian contrasts as he depicts a lawless society in desperate need of a modern-day knight to restore order. At the same time, Mr. Mercedes and Holly reflect upon the confines of the hardboiled formula, as both hero and villain find themselves enmeshed in the static characterizations common in crime fiction. These novels succeed because they revive beloved hardboiled archetypes even as they interface with a postmodern reflexivity, which is to say, an exercise in the meta-criticism of derivative formulas applied to contemporary times and circumstances.

The article discusses nine Russian films and television series employing the theme of time travel to the USSR era. The protagonists of these films, released between 1995 and 2019, are ordinary, contemporary Russians. The authors use the characters’ juxtaposition against the backdrop of the 1960– 1990 Soviet Union as a pretext for assessing the positive and negative aspects of the period. Early examples marked by a nostalgic tone, offering largely uncritical portrayals of the communist past. Later ones attempted more nuanced, broader depictions of the USSR’s the social realities, highlighting both its appealing and problematic elements. Only the most recent works raised deeper issues such as individual freedom, the right to make autonomous decisions about one’s life — and the absence of these under the previous regime. The circumstances in which time travel occurs are varied — ranging from purely fantastical occurrences ones, through simulated journeys — during which the characters participate in carefully staged ‘visits to the USSR,’ guided by actors posing as ‘ordinary citizens — to actual traversals through time using a time machine. In terms of genre, these films generally fall within the realm of drama, but individual examples of adventure or crime stories also appear. Others include utopian or dystopian themes, such as a vision of a hypothetical future USSR. The article argues that the analysed cultural texts should be recognised as legitimate contributions to the discussion about the feeling of systemic collapse that prevailed in the final years and aftermath of the Soviet state, as well as the perceived gains and losses experienced by Russian society during that time.

Postapocalyptic narratives proliferate in contemporary fiction and cinema. A convincing and successful representative of the genre, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014) can nevertheless be distinguished from other postapocalyptic texts, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy, and the television series The Walking Dead (2010–). The novel does not focus on survival, struggle, and conflict but rather examines the possibility and necessity of cultural expression in a postapocalyptic setting, demonstrating the importance and value of art and memory even in strained circumstances. As a result, it presents an unusually optimistic and hopeful vision of an otherwise bleak future.

This book examines the transformative impact of female writer-performers on UK television comedy from 2010 to 2020, focusing on the work of Julia Davis, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Caitlin and Caroline Moran, Michaela Coel, and Sharon Horgan. It argues that these women have expanded and challenged Kathleen Rowe's influential notion of the "unruly" woman, addressing intersectional issues of class, race, age, and regionality in their work. The book proposes a new framework for understanding female comic authorship, introducing the concept of the "fastidious" woman to capture how these creators exhibit meticulous craft and manage often ambivalent reception in the current media landscape. Central to this study is an exploration of the dynamic relationship between creator, craft, and context, illuminating how these elements intersect to shape the production and reception of women's comedy. Through detailed analysis of key television series and the creators' public personas, it explores how these women navigate industry pressures, public scrutiny, and changing discourses around feminism and identity. The study examines the rise of semi-autobiographical comedy, the impact of streaming platforms, and the transnational appeal of UK female comedians. By analysing the work of these influential figures both on and off-screen, this book illuminates the evolving role of women in contemporary television comedy and proposes new directions for understanding female agency and creativity in TV production and authorship.

The Mézga Family is an animated television series that ran for three seasons in Hungary between 1970 and 1980 (produced between 1968 and 1978). In the first season, the twentieth-century Hungarian family establishes contact with their descendant from the thirtieth century who sends them futuristic gadgets whose use results in various adventures. In the second season, the family’s youngest member goes out on missions to other planets in a spaceship built by himself. In the third season, the family goes on vacation during which several calamities befall them. The irony directed at facile utopian desires allowed the series to subtly express deeper-penetrating concerns but simultaneously remain light-hearted. This article introduces the term ‘cynical utopia’ to explain how the season generates multi-layered meanings and critical commentary. By using the conventions of utopia, sf and fairy tales, the series could discuss social and even political issues in a period when state control over media content was strict in Hungary and the production of a clearly dystopian work on national television would have been unimaginable.