Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American LiteratureThe Poetics of InsecurityConsuming Catastrophe

Can we speak of a literary, or of a critical, disaster studies? If so, what would its archives look like, and what methods might we employ in examining them? The three books under review offer diverging answers to these questions. The authors provide a diverse sampling of recent work on the rhetoric, aesthetics, and politics of disaster that is now emerging in American literary and cultural studies.John Hay’s Postapocalyptic Fantasies in Antebellum American Literature provides a view of the early importance of postapocalyptic thinking in American literature. His comprehensive study ranges from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War, weaving readings of well-known authors like James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain with travel narratives, contemporary best sellers, and writing in the newly emerging historical sciences of the day such as geology, anthropology, and archaeology. Hay argues not only that we can trace the origins of what would later become postapocalyptic fiction to the antebellum period but also that the postapocalyptic rhetoric of the period complicates the idea that writers of the day understood their own place in history as exceptional. By paying attention to how these writers imagined America as, paradoxically, “a new world in ruins,” Hay demonstrates that they “tended to conflate well-known exceptionalist mantras about novelty and rebirth with less-acknowledged themes of antiquity and degeneration” (13). For example, the second chapter examines writing about biological extinction from contemporary geologists with close readings of literary treatments of the then-popular last man trope, including Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) and Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Crater (1846). While for Shelley the trope presented the opportunity to meditate on the aesthetic problems involved in narrating the end of history, Hay argues that Cooper uses the last man trope to expose, in The Last of the Mohicans, and then to critique, in The Crater, a core tenet of American exceptionalism and settler colonialism: the idea that the people who lived on the land before European colonization were on their way toward extinction.The book’s many strengths lie in this kind of historicism. Hay makes thoughtful connections across a wide range of materials, convincingly showing how antebellum literary works both responded and contributed to key scientific, cultural, and political discourses of the day. But the book’s argument about the political work of postapocalyptic fantasies is not as powerful as it might be. It is not until the book’s brief postscript, for instance, that Hay meaningfully discusses the fact that for the indigenous people who survived centuries of war, disease, land seizure, and forced relocation, there was nothing fantastical about a postapocalyptic world at all. The century and a half of postapocalyptic fiction that has succeeded the work Hay discusses emphasizes that disasters are uneven in their distributions and effects. This book ultimately leaves unanswered questions about why postapocalyptic fantasies provide such a powerful way of ignoring postapocalyptic realities.While Hay’s book provides a history of thinking about the aftermath of disaster, Johannes Voelz’s The Poetics of Insecurity seeks to uncover how American authors have responded to the threat of disaster. Voelz’s book is focused on the intertwined concepts of security and insecurity. Through a wide-ranging series of readings of American literature from the early republic to the twenty-first century—including work by Charles Brockden Brown, Harriet Jacobs, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, and Don DeLillo—Voelz emphasizes the differing literary and aesthetic strategies the works he investigates deploy to recuperate the pleasures, ambiguities, and multiple uses of security and insecurity. Such recuperation includes, for example, the expanded understanding of personal agency made possible by experiences of bodily insecurity in Brown’s Arthur Mervyn (1799) and Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the affective similarities between the experiences of security and insecurity in Cather’s The Professor’s House (1925) and O’Connor’s short stories, and the value of the sense of personal finitude offered by experiences of insecurity in DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003). In this attention to the affective possibilities of security and insecurity, Voelz writes against what he calls “the culture-of-fear thesis” taken up by a number of prominent security theorists: the idea that fear is at the foundation of the contemporary politics of security (8).One of the book’s strengths is this advocacy for a more expansive understanding of security and insecurity. Voelz emphasizes that fear is not the only affect insecurity produces, showing in each chapter how “security and insecurity are multifaceted in ways that go far beyond today’s political discourse of security” (3). Another strength is the book’s insistence, pace Catherine Gallagher’s influential argument about the rise of fictionality in the context of other speculative modes of reasoning in the eighteenth century, that literature has much to teach us about the relationship between fictionality and security discourses, what Voelz refers to as the “foundational modern cultural matrix of contingency management” (183). However, the choice to focus on only one author in each chapter, and sometimes on only one text, leaves the reader less with an overarching theory about the poetics of insecurity in American literature than with a series of complex yet disconnected case studies examining how a few canonical authors have contributed to such a poetics. In light of Hay’s study, the absence of representatives from those twentieth- and twenty-first-century genres that have arguably contributed the most to our understanding of the aesthetics of security, insecurity, and disaster—including science fiction, postapocalyptic fiction, and political thrillers—is particularly noticeable.Although sociologist Timothy Recuber’s Consuming Catastrophe is written mainly for scholars in communications and the social sciences, his careful and conceptually rich analysis of the mass mediation of disaster in the United States during the first decade of the twenty-first century has much to offer scholars in literary and cultural studies. Recuber discusses the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the shooting at Virginia Tech, September 11, the financial crisis, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in mainstream television news, reality television, and online memorials. One of his most powerful arguments is that the coverage of disasters in the mainstream news media encourages not sympathy but rather a form of “empathetic hedonism” that advocates pursuing an “authentic” understanding of the experiences of victims of disaster as an end in of itself (19). Recuber argues, “The consumption of disaster thus encourages a kind of ‘political anesthesia’ . . . that reduces one’s ability to recognize the collective solutions to problems” (19). For example, chapter 4 discusses the Hurricane Katrina and September 11 online memorials, arguing that the stories posted to these sites reflect the prevalence of “a therapeutic ideal, in which the restoration of one’s mental health after a tragic or difficult event is of paramount importance” (130). Recuber gently critiques this tendency for its focus on “individual catharsis” at the expense of collective action, while simultaneously exploring how these forms of user-generated media might challenge some of the inequities present in the mainstream news coverage of these disasters (131).Scholars in literary and cultural studies may find some of Recuber’s methods unfamiliar, and they may object to the idea that disasters are somehow perceived as more “authentic” than other events in the news and to the generalizations he makes in the first chapter when discussing a long history of public fascination with disasters. But his arguments about the failure of empathy to provide a way to confront the necessarily political challenges disasters present are timely and far-reaching. Recuber’s study drives home the point that individual solutions to social problems are never enough. And disasters, as all three of these books show, are insistently social. Disasters make plain how we live—and don’t live—in common, who benefits from such arrangements, and who doesn’t

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