9/11/2014 - Tommaso Angelini

Apart from watching a couple post-apocalyptic movies I have not had much experience reading the "post-catastrophic novel" as Chad Harbach so eloquently puts. After reading Harbach's set of summaries, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I found it quite interesting how post-apocalpytic stories and novels have evolved over time. One point Harbach made that struck me was the idea that post-apocalpytic novels parallel the era in which they were written. For example, most of the stories that were written before the Cold War, revolved around a dystopia-like setting. Novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 immediately come to mind. These type of stories focused on governments restricting people's liberties and freedoms in an effort to have total social control. Authors like Huxley and Orwell most likely could not conceptualize the idea of global nuclear warfare. However, after World War II and the Manhattan Project, post-apocalpytic novels started to change in accordance with the time period. I found this incredibly interesting because even though "the end of the world notion" is often criticized and disparaged by skeptics, apocalyptic novels still manage to maintain themes that resemble and parallel what is going in the world. I never would have described apocalyptic novels as realistic, but after reading Chad Harbarch's The End I was convinced that this genre has a lot to offer for people who are trying to explore the fantasy side of literature while still learning about history and repercussions  (regardless of how far fetched they may be) caused by our previous past actions.