Time is not simply linear but layered, variously folded, interlacing the present with
reflections of the past and the to-come. An important facet of such a non-self-corresponding present is its relation to the traces we will have left, the closures we imagine: how today might look in the future's eye. This perspective can be formalized by the notion of the future anterior, transposed from a tempus into a narrative and existential stance (what will have been). Since post-apocalyptic fiction harbors in its structural and thematic core precisely such a preoccupation with backward-looking futural projections, it is a narrative form particularly intimately related to the perspective of the future anterior. This relation, in its different aspects, is the subject of the present dissertation.

Due to the essential connection between post-apocalyptic fictions and the future anterior, the study argues, such fictions provide exceptional possibilities for the examination of both topical and more broadly existential issues extending far beyond their nominal genre. On their topical side, these possibilities self-evidently concern the apocalyptic tonalities of our cultural, political and ecological situation, but also issues such as the creation and preservation of memory, the construction of communality through nostalgia, or the general anthropocene discussion. On the existential side, the questions raised by the post-apocalyptic future anterior relate to human finitude, the value of futurity, the relationship between history and nature, and the transtemporal generation of meaning.

The study explicates the dynamics of the post-apocalyptic perspective through the notion of the “mimetic future anterior”, a narrative strategy that prompts the reader to situate the present world in the past of the fictive post-apocalyptic setting. Engaging our present moment from such an angle connects to a sensibility that can be called proleptic mourning: the understanding, evidently not limited to post-apocalyptic fictions but potentially catalyzed by their speculative disasters, that the things we hold dear to our existence (communities, cultures, technologies) will before long be destroyed or decisively altered. Depending on the perspective, the evanescence of all things might compromise their value or alternatively highlight their fragile numinosity. Aspects of such proleptic mourning are in this study examined under the monikers of future trauma, future melancholia and future nostalgia.

The dissertation’s primary corpus is a group of novels in the English language: Fiskadoro by Denis Johnson (1985), The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006), Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery (2012) and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014). Contextualized close readings of these works serve as the foundation for more general philosophical and culture-theoretic engagements with the subjects discussed. The theoretical underpinnings of the study come from (so-called continental) philosophy and philosophical literary studies, three prominent influences being Mark Currie’s work on the future anterior, Claire Colebrook’s work on extinction and Jacques Derrida’s work especially on the subjects of archive, haunting and futurity. In its general orientation the study relates to narrative hermeneutics, charting the ways in which existential meaning is crafted through narratives.