Stručni rad
Deconstruction and the Future in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
Leoni Flower Finocchiaro
Sažetak
This paper discusses the incessant refusal and inability of Mark Spitz, the
protagonist of Colson Whitehead’s novel Zone One, to imagine the future and compares it to deconstruction – a way of loosening the screws from inside a system in order to let innovation and the future through. Derrida’s notion of invention and his musings on the future become the tools of preparation for the arrival of an alternative to the postmodern, late capitalist world Zone One is situated in. Although the novel has so far mostly been analysed as a work on capitalist realism and its symptoms as defined by Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, the poststructuralist lens offers a different perspective. Focused on the closure of the narrative, alongside other aspects such as the representation of zombies, people and New York City in the novel, this paper aims to make visible the ending of the novel as the final result of the novel-long deconstructionist work of the protagonist, which results in an alternative to the existing late capitalist and capitalist realist surroundings of postmodern life. In this paper this view is also contrasted to the typical readings of Zone One, as embodied in Leif Sorensen’s essay “Against the Post-Apocalyptic: Narrative Closure in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.”
Ključne riječi
apocalypse; capitalism; deconstruction; postmodernism; poststructuralism; zombies; Colson Whitehead; Zone One
Hrčak ID:
317908
URI
Datum izdavanja:
17.5.2022.
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