CAPAS Team Michael Dunn Earthly Ends
Reading Through Environmental Apocalypse
Research Project
As toxic planetary entanglements ensue, the discourse, narratives, and cultural imaginary of climate mitigation in the domineering and problematic Anthropocene take on an apocalyptic tone (Derrida). Michael Dunn’s PhD project Earthly Ends: Reading Through Environmental Apocalypse combines three enormous ontological areas (apocalypse, Anthropocene, and ecocriticism) in an attempt to trace the apocalyptic imaginary of the last literary century. Exploring the vast implications of post-apocalyptic environmentalism (Cassegard and Thörn 2022) as multimodal genre, Earthly Ends aims to assess the seismic shifts in conceptions of the natural world from pastoral to global and from romantic, sublime, and conquerable to ecologically uncanny (especially to those of us not yet living at the forefront of extreme weather events, wet bulb ‘wastelands,’ and sites of extractivism) and endlessly entangled. While the biblical apocalypse is fundamentally narratological in nature, this project aims to look beyond the Hollywood hedonism of audio-visual implications of sudden catastrophe or the post-apocalyptic reappropriation of conservative utopianism, to the slow decay and slow violence (Nixon 2011; Marran 2017) of climate change which suggests a necessary shift in tainted temporalities of an apocalypse that began long ago, is ever unfolding, and continues to proliferate the present via colonialism, the myth of green progress, unsustainability, and extractivism.
