Reseña: Aceptando el final: el apocalipsis americano en el siglo XXI (original) (raw)

Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Sibylle Machat's In the Ruins of Civilizations is an ambitious ecocritical exploration of American twenty-first century apocalyptic writing. The study is serious, wellconceived, analytical, and thorough in terms of scope, theoretical depth, and application. Ruins of Civilizations successfully investigates, amongst other issues, the "different levels of knowledge and forgetfulness" between different narrative levels of twenty-first century American fiction. As a result, Machat forces us to reconsider the ways in which we conceive of the twenty-first century American apocalyptic novel. This study is highly recommended for those with interests in ecocriticism and the apocalypse, and more specifically, in recent American aesthetic manifestations of doom. The book is divided into several sections, including an historical and contextual review, theoretical discussion, and case studies of four American novels that deal primarily with apocalyptic narratives that were published after 2000. The first section is an extensive historical and contextual review. Important is that the background information is efficiently provided, and gradually builds an argument for the theoretical discussion that follows. One of the major questions of the study is: "How does the state of the physical world influence, determine, and limit" the scope of the post-apocalyptic society that develops in the selected narratives? Also important is that Machat attempts to understand better what she calls the different narrative levels of the texts in question. One of the strongest parts of the theoretical section, in my view, is a very helpful table Machat includes called "Nature and Mankind in the Post-apocalypse-a classification of some major examples" (53-54), which will no doubt work as a map for future ecocritical researchers when thinking about important distinctions between different apocalyptic scenarios. The bulk of In the Ruins of Civilizations is dedicated to case studies of four central texts: Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Bernard Beckett's Genesis (2009), and Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009). The first case study deals with Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and starts by reflecting on narrative structure and world building in the novel. The author emphasizes the motif of "doubling" in the narrative, which in Oryx and Crake involves two temporal threads as well as different dystopian visions. Also discussed in this chapter is the importance of names to the characters in the narrative as well as the use of borrowed