The (post)apocalypse and the reflexive text

This thesis considers the status of the "end" in the literature of the late twentieth century. The very proliferation of announcements on the end (of truth, man, history, the world) has undermined to some extent the force of the apocalypse. In an age where "the sense of an ending" (which has traditionally, as Frank Kermode has argued, restored the world to the word) is under siege, some literary critics have suggested that the world is forever lost to the word, while others, mourning the loss of revelation, have tried to restore the world to the word. This study considers four contemporary writers who neither indulge in nostalgia for revelation nor herald the triumph of the sign, but who take up the challenge of reworking narratives that have formerly been secured by the apocalypse. Don DeLillo's White Noise turns to a reading of America as the end of the world. Echoing earlier readings of America as the New World, DeLillo's novel suggests that both the utopic and dystopic visions are fuelled by the desire to master death. DeLillo thus reworks the end to signal not revelation but unknowing. Toni Morrison's Beloved reads America in terms of the lost archives of the African slaves, who died leaving no "trace." Beloved posits that the tradition of history as a revelatory discourse based on facts and documents that testify to the "here's and now's" cannot account for this loss. Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children suggests that the apocalyptic narratives of the modern nation and the Islamic nation are dependent upon the seclusion or veiling of women. The unveiling of women in the nation thus paradoxically undermines the apocalyptic rhetoric of unveiling that secures the nation. Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus reads the unveiling of "woman" (the institutionalisation of the female nude) at the fin de siecle against women unveiling (women agitating for public recognition). Carter's novel intimates that the privileging of the unveiled "woman" and the resistance to public women, women unveiling, distracts us from the performance of modern man.