Dressing Disaster: Apocalyptics After '68

Abstract

In the first of two sections of this multimodal dissertation project, I analyze depictions of apocalyptic catastrophe—and the descriptions of attire found therein—in three Anglophone novels of the years around 1968: Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains, and Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar. In my analysis, I draw on psychoanalytic and critical theory to explore the potentials for interdependent identity and community building across differences symbolic, imagined, and real within catastrophe and its implicit threat of total destruction, especially as depicted through the "written clothing". In the coda, I draw on the literary, theoretical, and psychoanalytic principles I have outlined in the first, analytic section and consider their relevance for the contemporary experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, explosive ecological destruction, and the global uprising for Black Lives. I draw on autoethnography and autotheory methodologies for this Digital Humanities exploration of nonlinear analysis, pushing the boundaries of traditional literary criticism. Through these analyses and creative-critical texts, I argue for an "alchemical apocalypse" that can emerge from traditional notions of what I call the "false apocalypse," where alchemical apocalypse is fractal, intimate, fluid, transformative, ungraspable, and wild.