This dissertation examines end-of-world and posthumanist themes in speculative fiction and theory through the concept of “world unmaking.” Reading for world unmaking in three popular U.S. works of speculative fiction — Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014), and N. K. Jemisin’s the Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) — it explores how varying representations of “the end” are deployed to destabilize normative ideals of the human and the world that undergird conventional notions of the subject under late liberal humanism. While much attention has been paid to world building and how inherent logics cohere within fictional worlds, world unmaking asks how representations of world disorder, instability, and breakdown might hold important insights for narrating and navigating disordered worlds. Contemporary posthumanist critical theorists increasingly vie for speculative practices that disrupt the inherited onto-epistemologies of liberal humanisms and settler colonialisms. In particular, new materialists and speculative realists argue urgent work must be done to expand thought beyond naturalized and neutralized discourses that subtend conventional versions of reality, especially as the pressures of multiple ecological and geopolitical crises bear down unequally upon the lives of both humans and nonhumans on a shared planet Earth. The rise in popularity of post-apocalyptic, eco-catastrophe, and survival narratives in recent decades suggests a growing appetite for speculative imaginings of the end. While some representations of the end of the world serve as an escape from the intersecting crises of the environment, the resurgence of right-wing politics and white supremacy, and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, this dissertation illustrates the importance of attending to speculative imaginings that use the end-of-the-world conceit to destabilize dominant culture and pose more expansive questions about what it means to be human. / Graduate / 2022-04-19

"Invasive cultures: American culture in Bret Easton Ellis’ American psycho” proposes that Ellis' small body of fictional works can be read as active critiques of American culture, detailing the ways in which this culture informs the current condition of American society in recent times. The larger intent of this thesis is to delineate and examine the relays between American culture, the forces of capitalism that underlie them, and their significant bearing on the social behaviour, personal expression and psychology of Ellis’ characters, who often directly assimilate and embody its characteristics, whether physically or mentally. Ellis presents his characters as deeply informed by their contact with the cultural realm. / Ellis' preoccupations with popular and consumer cultures, with the increasingly invasive mass media, and with a visually oriented society obsessed with surfaces, are all examined in the light of how these cultures are radically entangled with the consciousness and behaviour of his characters. In Ellis' fiction, the banal and the sensational are lucrative fixtures of a culture that functions as a commercial industry, driven by profit like any other, that exploits the desires and expectations of its consumers. Moreover, these common representations and modes of expression are presented as contagious, seeping into personal modes of self-expression. Just as Ellis instances how culture rigorously shapes the body and lifestyle, he also demonstrates through the stylized consciousness of his characters the media's powerful influence on their subjectivity and behaviour. This thesis focuses on American psycho (1991) but also discusses Ellis' other novels Less than zero (1984), The rules of attraction (1987), and The informers (1994).

My thesis discusses male identity in contemporary culture in relation to work by Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. Such work reflects the problems, anxieties, and dilemmas of the masculine subject in American culture. The characters in my six selected texts, namely, Ellis' Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and Glamorama, and Palahniuk's Fight Club, Survivor, and Choke, symbolize a generation with no discernible future. Each male protagonist finds himself in a place of no time and no meaning because image and illusion have supplanted essence. These characters combat culture-prevalent emptiness in the sense that each ironically re-asserts his so-called individuality against the dogmas of the establishment. Each, furthermore, is aware that his existence is not subject to a higher order or preset goal: traditional morality thereby has no meaning. My selected texts feature masculine subjects struggling with their own contingencies once stripped of given privileges (gender, class, race, and otherwise). To examine the notion of masculinity, I emphasize the role of power relations in gender construction. Bret Easton Ellis characterizes a world of appearance defined by particular styles. Chuck Palahniuk's males are empty--they do not have any definitive meaning. Judith Butler challenges the proposition of a fixed identity, or an essential permanent masculinity or femininity as structured and reified by social norms. Therefore, we should not view masculinity as a cohesive and homogeneous category. Following Foucault, I examine the relationship between masculine subjects and social practices. At stake here, is how the performative articulation of proper masculinity disempowers and imprisons the masculine subject in a material form over which he has no control. The body becomes the object of desire and thus the vehicle/preserve of the sense of powerlessness that the masculine subject experiences daily within a hegemonic culture. Power is exercised through a dominant presence. This presence structures as a binary classification serving to underscore differences and ensure particular privileged social positioning. The proposition of a fixed identity, or an essential permanent masculinity or femininity, is structured and reified by social norms. Masculinity as a cohesive and homogeneous category is historically represented as an unstable center from which all other identities are defined.