The purpose of this paper is to examine, through the process of close reading, the usage of different motives and narrative perspectives in Max Brooks´ bestselling novel World war Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, such as narration, the usage of the zombie and moral projections. As this paper also takes an overviewing pedagogic direction, the paper aims to present the positive outcome of reading fiction, in alignment with the envisionment-arguments of Judith A. Langer, and how this can be implemented in the Swedish school system. A great amount of different claims were made in the analysis, due to the setting of the narratological hermeneutic alignment. For instance, the analysis revealed that WWZ could be read as an exposition of human behavior, when pushed to the edge of extinction, but it can also be seen as a mockumentary in book form – exposing some of the backsides of the capitalistic system. As for the pedagogic perspective, Langer’s concept of envisionment shows that merging the reading of fiction with group discussion can widen pupils grasping of different world phenomena, and thus stimulate their will for a lifelong learning, which correlates with one the of the core objectives and values in the Swedish school curriculum.

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The zombie narrative has seen an increasing trend towards the emergence of a zombie sentience. The intention of this thesis is to examine the cultural framework that has informed the contemporary figure of the zombie, with specific attention directed towards the role of the thinking, conscious or sentient zombie. This examination will include an exploration of the zombie’s folkloric origin, prior to the naming of the figure in 1819, as well as the Haitian appropriation and reproduction of the figure as a representation of Haitian identity. The destructive nature of the zombie, this thesis argues, sees itself intrinsically linked to the notion of apocalypse; however, through a consideration of Frank Kermode’s A Sense of an Ending, the second chapter of this thesis will propose that the zombie need not represent an apocalypse that brings devastation upon humanity, but rather one that functions to alter perceptions of ‘humanity’ itself. The third chapter of this thesis explores the use of the term “braaaaiiinnss” as the epitomised zombie voice in the figure’s development as an effective threat within zombie-themed videogames. The use of an epitomised zombie voice, I argue, results in the potential for the embodiment of a zombie subject. Chapter Four explores the development of this embodied zombie subject through the introduction of the Zombie Memoire narrative and examines the figure as a representation of Agamben’s Homo Sacer or ‘bare life’: though often configured as a non-sacrificial object that can be annihilated without sacrifice and consequence, the zombie, I argue, is also paradoxically inscribed in a different, Girardian economy of death that renders it as the scapegoat to the construction of a sense of the ‘human’. The final chapter of this thesis argues that both the traditional zombie and the sentient zombie function within the realm of a posthuman potentiality, one that, to varying degrees of success, attempts to progress past the restrictive binaries constructed within the overruling discourse of humanism. In conclusion, this thesis argues that while the zombie, both traditional and sentient, attempts to propose a necessary move towards a posthuman universalism, this move can only be considered if the ‘us’ of humanism embraces the potential of its own alterity.