‘NO ONE RIDES THE MTA ANYMORE’: SURVIVORSHIP AND THE URBAN APOCALYPSE IN SEVERANCE AND IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS

Abstract

Is there value to be found in living through an apocalypse, famously a space of desolation and entropy? If so, what might that value be, and what does humanity (in both senses of the word) look like in a world where it is no longer prevalent? Situating this question within the apocalyptic cities of Ling Ma’s Severance (2018) and Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987), this thesis makes the case for the survivor as a particularly well-equipped model of value-making within the urban apocalyptic, and argues that the corroborative ties between the survivor and the city give rise to a productive and rehabilitative order of post-apocalyptic living. The survivor is a “conduit” for and a “conductor” of the apocalyptic city: while it is she who experiences the world’s end, and through her that the experience is conveyed, she is not a passive victim or simple channel of the apocalypse, but rather forms a resistance against its overwhelming force. Survivorship is ultimately productive of a unifying and ordering narrative in which the vital forces of community and knowledge crystallise, creating a nexus from which the recuperation of an apocalyptic world may begin.