Abstract on Simulacra and The Road

My final paper will examine the ability (or lack thereof) of literature to construct an apocalyptic landscape. The lack of imagination when dealing with the apocalypse results in the necessity of the apocalyptic landscape to be detailed in terms of hyperreality. This use of Baudrillard's third order of simulacra creates a text that it eerie not for what it creates, but for its “disquietingly strange details.” It is the contrast of the banal and the extraordinary that makes apocalyptic texts, like Cormac McCarthy’s the road, so effective and affecting. Unlike text that function in the second order, McCarthy’s apocalyptic world does not rest on science fiction as its foundation. Rather than the limitless, the road faces a world with nothing but limits.