Apocalyptic Narcissism and the Difficulty of Mourning

Florian Mussgnug

doi:10.13125/2039-6597/2214

Florian Mussgnug UCL

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13125/2039-6597/2214

Keywords: Death, Mourning, Apocalypse, Sigmund Freud, René Girard

Abstract

In this article I examine how death and loss feature in recent apocalypse fiction and suggest that, in a genre mostly concerned with finitude, there appears to be paradoxically little room for expressions of mourning. I assess contemporary attitudes towards mortality through the writings of Philippe Ariès, Zygmunt Bauman, Simon Critchley and others, and propose a psychoanalytic reading of solitary survivor narrative, inspired by the work of Martin Jay. In the final part of the article, I turn to Sigmund Freud and René Girard to explore the relation between apocalyptic teleology, melancholy, and the expectation of global catastrophe.

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Author Biography

Florian Mussgnug, UCL

Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature at UCL and Director of the UCL Comparative Literature Programme. He works on modern and contemporary literature in Italian, English and German. He is especially interested in literary theory, experimental writing, critical animal studies, masculinity, environmental literature, cultural representations of catastrophe and apocalypse. He received his doctorate from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy, and his BA and MSt from the University of Oxford. He also taught at the University of Rome, where he was Visiting Professor of Comparative Literature in 2010-11. His book The Eloquence of Ghosts: Giorgio Manganelli and the Afterlife of the Avant-Garde (2010) was awarded the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2012. His most recent book The Good Place: Comparative Perspectives on Utopia (co-edited with Matthew Reza) was published in 2014. He is co-founder of the London Intercollegiate Network for Comparative Studies (LINKS) and co-investigator of the AHRC-funded research project “Interdisciplinary Italy 1900-2020: Interart/Intermedia”. His next book will be on the end of the world.

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