Literature and the Word

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the prominent images in contemporary women’s post-apocalyptic fiction of words, texts or narratives that have survived the end of the world. Such texts could be part of a nostalgic attempt at preservation of the archive, but in fact function as palimpsests that sustain, revise and transform meaning positively after the end. I pit Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ (1984) and its ideas of remainderless destruction of the juridico-literary archive against Adrienne Rich’s conception of writing as ‘re-vision’ and Luce Irigaray’s ideas about the exchange of women in ‘Women on the Market’ (1985). The novels studied in this chapter include Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family 2029–2047 (2016), Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death (2010), Doris Lessing’s General Dann and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), concluding with Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013).