Anthropocene Aesthetic Shifts in Post-Apocalyptic Literature: An Analysis of Waste and the Sublime in Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse

This article explores ‘apocalyptic waste’ in seven short stories from Maureen F. McHugh’s 2011 collection After the Apocalypse. McHugh (1959-) is a contemporary U.S. sci-fi and fantasy writer, whose fiction depict dystopian scenarios as varied as a China-dominated America, a sexist futuristic Morocco, and pandemics. Building on recent developments in theories of the sublime and waste aesthetics, this essay examines deployments of the notions and vocabularies of waste and the sublime in McHugh’s narratives as rhetorical strategies for representing the characters’ encounters with non-human others (zombies, human-like dolls, AI, and bio-batteries), or their experiences of traumatic events (bombings, family trauma) echoing our Anthropocene/Capitalocene moment. Coupled with its attention to the characters’ sensory perception and affects, this article’s analyses show that post-apocalyptic fiction is a fruitful site for exploring the shifting conceptual and aesthetic destinies of waste and the sublime and their relevance as critical concepts to the environmental humanities.

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Adapting representations of death from page to screen in Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983)

Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983; 1998) has been praised as a novella demonstrating a “gradual development of exquisite suspense” and distinguishing, in its subtlety, “the true ghost story” (Bann cited in Scullion, 2003: 296). This article examines James Watkins’ 2012 film adaptation with particular focus on representations of the complex relationship between death and screen, which will be addressed through a close reading of the novella alongside its filmic adaptation. Both Hill’s (1983) novella and Watkins’ (2012) adaptation are littered with representations of trauma, death, and the experience of dying, predominantly by women and children, who functioned on the outskirts of Victorian society and whose existence remained largely confined to the margins. As such, this article serves to establish how the film adaptation upholds the Gothic through the representations of trauma, death, and dying in relation to Hill’s (1983) novella with particular focus on the supernatural spectral haunting of Jennet Humfrye and the death that surrounds her at every turn. In terms of Watkins’ (2012) film adaptation, my discussion will focus on those previously oversimplified representations of gender to demonstrate Watkins’ critical commentary on the marginality of female trauma.

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‘At Its Heart, a Haunted Town’: Patriarchal Violence, Female Resistance, and Post-Trauma in Riverdale

This article explores thanatological themes in the CW drama Riverdale with attention to how the series employs death and its signifiers to construct a metaphor for patriarchal violence and its traumatic imprints. Focusing on three central female characters, it considers how Riverdale explores patriarchal violence and the trauma it produces both at the level of narrative and through experimentation with Gothic trappings, generic conventions, aesthetic sensibilities, non-diegetic effects, and allusions to other narratives of patriarchal violence. This analysis underscores how Riverdale discloses and navigates one of trauma's central paradoxes: the impossibility and the imperative of its representation. It considers also how the female body in Riverdale acts as a vehicle of resistance: a site where patriarchal violence is inscribed but might also be mobilized toward alternative forms of identity negotiation and interconnection, and toward arousing in the audience a desire to participate in the radical work of participatory witnessing.

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