Since Antiquity, end of the world narratives have given voice to the anxieties and crises of the times and societies that produced them. The forms of apocalypse are broad and diverse, both thematically and diachronically. As early as the dawn of the 19th century, Mary Shelley, in her The Last Man (1826), reflects on the plight of a lone survivor of a deadly virus; while the anguish of environmental destruction is still absent for chronological reasons, many 20th-century narratives will reflect on the annihilating potential of human action on ecosystems, beginning with texts such as Shiel's The Purple Cloud (1901) and London's The Scarlet Plague (1912). With the development of modern industrial civilization, and increasingly over the past few decades, there are increasing narratives in the Western world-not only in literature, but also in film, graphic novels, TV series, and video games-that ask what would happen if suddenly our civilization were to experience a catastrophe that would disrupt life on earth. In 1962 Ballard published The Drowned World, in which humans inhabit an ecosystem disrupted by rising sea levels; in 1978, with King's The Stand, it is the turn of a virus that has gotten out of control; the society of the aftermath, polarized between 'good guys' and 'bad guys,' must face harsh environmental conditions and prepare for the blast of an atomic bomb. But it is McCarthy's The Road (2006) that is the emblem of the contemporary post-apocalypse. These depictions give voice to concern about the fate of the world. One of the functions of literature is to show from an alienated and extreme perspective the present world and its future developments. First and foremost, the issue has strong social and ecological implications, and concerns the ability to think about the impending climate catastrophe in a world where technological development leads to the increasingly intensive exploitation of the planet's resources, changing its balance. Post-apocalyptic storytelling has the task of insisting on the dangers of the rhetoric of development at all costs that permeates advanced capitalist societies, showing how certain processes-primarily those involving climate change itself-once triggered lead to irreversible results. This is possible because literature functions as a space where anxieties are elaborated that find no voice elsewhere, for example in the functionalist discourse of the hyper-technological rhetoric of development at all costs. The course will reflect on the forms and genres that these kinds of narratives take on in the contemporary, including in light of their extreme intermedial adaptability.
In advanced capitalist societies, prosperity, gained through industrialization and at the cost of environmental damage, seems endless; but because of this, the narrative imagery, which functions as a space for the emergence of the repressed, gives voice to growing anxieties of environmental destruction. Indeed, the classic post-apocalyptic genre is played on the reversal one of the founding myths of industrial society: that of Robinson Crusoe who, thrown naked and bereft on an uninhabited but lush island, manages to provide himself with everything he needs through tireless ingenuity and industriousness. The protagonists (and protagonists) of contemporary post-apocalypses are also grappling with the extreme scarcity of means and unprecedented hardships of life, but while Robinson had a benign and fruitful nature at his disposal, their world is destroyed by an unprecedented catastrophe: the survivors move through the rubble of environment and society, collect remnants of now unserviceable objects, feed and clothe themselves with scraps, and are forced to migrate, in a horizon where any re-foundation seems impossible.
And in fact, an important part of these narratives is devoted to the description of how the protagonists have to reinvent a relationship with others, with objects and with places, which in the post turn out to be distorted: in contemporary post-apocalypses, Robinson's paradigm is inverted since men move alone and helpless within an environment that is usually neither lush nor benign, but rather hostile or barren. If Robinson's myth founded modern industrial civilization, with all the optimism and confidence in progress that industrialization brought with it, today the apocalyptic paradigm shows us the devastating effects on the environment of that same development: what was a dream three hundred years ago has now become a nightmare.