A glossary containing useful literary and philosophy terms reference in the Post-Apocalypse unit of The ZeroIndent Review.
Post Apocalypse
Definition
Stories concerned with the end of civilisation, often focused on the survivors of the collapse, or the ways that the collapse occurs.
Notes
Contemporary critics often claim this as a “new” genre but post apocalypse fiction has been around since the 1920’s in its modern aesthetics, exacerbated by the nuclear arms race.
Most point to Jeffries’ After London as the progenitor for, well, everything that Fallout does, for example.
Most post apocalypse stories concern themselves with three general categories of story:
- The collapse
- The Restoration
- The Survivor Story
Examples
- A Canticle For Leibowitz (novel)
- The Walking Dead (comic book)
- Station Eleven (novel)
- Station Eleven (TV)
The Collapse Story
Definition
Stories concerned with the moments during which society unravels. Adjacent, but not necessarily, disaster films.
Notes
Examples
The Restoration Fantasy
Definition
Stories concerned with rebuilding the lost world, either as a doomed project, or often as a “fated” return to goodness and civilisation.
Notes
Often but not always religious in the West.
Examples
The Survivor Story
Definition
Stories concerned with a narrow group of survivors, usually gathered together by circumstance, dealing with some existential threat after the collapse.
Heterotopia
Definition
Heterotopias are "worlds within worlds": both similar to their surroundings, and contrasting with or upsetting them. Foucault describes Heterotopia as a place where few, or none, of the members of a space have an intelligible connection to one another. Ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, planes.
Notes
Science fiction/fantasy/science fantasy/post apocalypse are often heterotopic in that they are worlds of radical difference that are indifferent to their inhabitants - think of the dying earth fantasy where the ending world doesn’t care about the people in it. Stories set in space etc.
crisis heterotopia - Foucault describes as "reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis" - often where coming of age or transformation occurs. Hotels, ships, boarding schools
Heterotopias of time - places where objects from many times are enclosed in space, such that they are of a time and outside of time as they are built to endure time: museums, churchs, graveyards.
Heteroglossia
Definition
The existence of multiple viewpoints within a given text. Supplied by the suggestion that reality is living discourse, and textual analysis is the act of pushing and pulling centralising and decentralising ideas that produce varied, contextual points of view.
Notes
Examples
Materialism
Definition
The suggestion that the world is reducible to physical, massy objects that are produced by, and exert ideology.
Notes
Example
Epistemology
(In the context of post apocalypse, often referred to as epistemological frameworks)
Definition
Philosophy that posits all knowledge is a product of sense memory, challenging the tension between empiricism and rationalism (a.k.a. theory of knowledge).
Notes
In the post-apocalypse, we often talk about the decay of epistemological frameworks as the world ends. Everything from the destruction of the internet, to the literal loss of actual practical knowledge (e.g. how to repair generators, maintain solar panels etc.).
Also known as theory of knowledge.