عنوان

Hearth of Darkness:

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انگلیسی

Hearth of Darkness:

[Thesis]

Cohen, Sara Simcha

The Familiar, the Familial, and the Zombie

Kaufman, Eleanor

UCLA

2013

UCLA

2013

As it repositions the living dead from the apocalypse to the messianic, my dissertation offers a new position on the interdisciplinary relationship between Jewish culture and popular culture by reframing the zombie as a hopeful metonym.

Recently, the zombie has become the vogue in both the critical domain and the popular cultural domain. The zombie's flatness, its role as an anti-character, serves as a cipher upon which to project various abstractions: zombies have been wielded as allegories for the labor market, the death of the novel, the anxieties over consumer culture, the fear of nuclear disaster, the preoccupation with life after death, and the tension between science and nature. And although the zombie's slippery position on the border between the highbrow and the popular and its historical fluidity across the boundary from cultural figure to filmic illustration have catapulted it to the heights of popularity, as it lumbers across national, cultural, artistic, and intellectual borders, the zombie is always located in the milieu of an apocalyptic genre, is perpetually associated with the catastrophic end of the world and the erasure of humanity. Entitled "Hearth of Darkness: The Familiar, the Familial, and the Zombie," my dissertation attempts to relocate the zombie from its position in the apocalypse, offering instead a redemptive reading of the living dead."Hearth of Darkness" considers the influence Jewish history and culture have had on the production of American popular horror culture. A thorough examination of the zombie from its roots in the voodoo tradition, through its rise and fall in American film and comic book culture as well as in the Yiddish and Jewish American literary canon, this work considers the zombie in terms of its allegorical value in history and philosophy, and argues that the zombie represents the threat of contagion, eliciting fear precisely because it cannot be contained, and so revealing our implicit need to discipline a disordered and disorderly society. However, by exploring the positive value of the zombie, "Hearth of Darkness" investigates the way in which the zombie has shaped and reoriented familiar spaces and institutions, redefining the terms of the zombie and positioning it not at the end of humanity and of the world, but at the beginning: as the marker of redemption, the advocate of disorder, the witness to history, and the progenitor of a new family.The project's first chapter, "A Living Man, A Clay Man: Violence, the Zombie, and the Messianic in H. Leivick's The Golem," includes the Yiddish literary and cultural figure of the golem under the rubric of the living dead in order to explore the themes of catastrophe and apocalypse in H. Leivick's 1921 Yiddish dramatic poem The Golem. This chapter examines violence and its relation to the messianic via Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay "Critique of Violence." Published the same year as Leivick's dramatic poem, Benjamin's critique rewrites the discussion of law and justice as one of messianism and divine law, positing that true justice consists of violence that founds revelation. Leivick's play noticeably challenges Benjamin's categories in its depiction of a world in which the innately violent golem is the only appropriate messiah for its time, but in which the very dimension of violence is rewritten as one of love. My reading of this underappreciated Yiddish text positions the golem in the context of apocalyptic and messianic writing, probes the relation between Leivick's depiction of the golem and contemporary representations of the zombie, and, in questioning the extent of the relationship between violence and the messianic, considers the influence of Jewish culture in establishing the canons of American popular horror culture.Chapter Two, "The Legend of Disorder: The Living Dead, Disorder, and Autoimmunity in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend," moves from a discussion of the folkloric golem to an examination of biopolitics and the question of life, and constructs a nuanced analysis of the issues brought into relief by the vampires in Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. Through my reading of the relationship between plague and containment, and via the work of Michel Foucault, I address the way Matheson's vampire discourse reveals the implicitly violent order in the zombie's disorderly infection. Matheson's living dead underscore the relationship between the plague and the order it induces as well as the self-negating violence inherent in that order. As they extend the lineage from vampire to zombie, the living dead here draw attention to the underlying theme of contagion that runs throughout the zombie narrative; however, the very state of living dead disorder emerges as a positive state in its relationship to the category of the autoimmune, relocating the zombie from the post-apocalyptic to the redemptive.The third chapter, "Muzzled Monsters: 1950s Comic Book Trends and the Zombie as Witness," examines and articulates a bifurcation in the historical production of comic books: horror comics, which are graphic and grisly and were ultimately censored in the 1950s, and superhero comics, which feature heroes with superpowers and have grown vastly in popularity. In reading these comic book trends, I consider the role of the zombie in relation to the act of witnessing as it occurs in the wake of the Holocaust, engaging with genocide studies by way of popular culture. Reading the work of Elie Wiesel and of Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben notes the lacuna at the core of witnessing: life and testimony are necessarily preclusive of one another. To live is to testify on behalf of the dead. Agamben points to many Holocaust survivors who were driven to survive by the possibility that they might speak to the trauma they had experienced. However, for Agamben, the true witness can only ever be mute. My work examines the production of the American comic book in the post-war period as a response to the Agambenian lacuna of witnessing. My project argues that the divided response to the dual trends of comic books - the eventual censorship of the horror comic book and promotion of the superhero comic book - points to a disturbing conspiracy of silence with respect to the Holocaust. For while Superman can (and often does) prevent the grim reality of war, it is the living dead who prove the true witnesses; the ability to be both living and dead, to have experienced the fullest extent of trauma and then be revivified to speak of it, is the prerequisite for a complete witness. And in the realm of popular culture, the brutality of the Holocaust was silenced in favor of the American superhero, the possibility of Superman who could protect the community via the fantasy of assimilation and integration. The final chapter, "Final Families: Sacrifice, Rebirth, and the Zombie as More than Mere Apocalypse," considers the possibility of the zombie not only as a witness to the past, but moreover as a hope for the future. By exploring the link between the zombie genre and feminist film theory, this chapter addresses the ways the zombie film genre complicates Carol Clover's theory of the Final Girl, the masculinized female character, and redefines the notion of family. In contrast to the typical slasher horror film, zombie narratives appear to break with the Final Girl dynamic, typically adopting a father figure, who is sacrificed to allow for the redemption of a "final family," a hapless collection of survivors who band together as a family in order to survive. By reading zombie films from the late 1960s through today, including George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the very recent World War Z (2013), this chapter addresses the role of the zombie within the larger context of horror films, considers the impact the restructuring of the Final Girl has on our conceptions of horror, of the family, and of the familiar, and positions the zombie as a model for understanding the institution of family.The zombie's precarious position on the border between culture and representation allows for the possibility of a more malleable discursive boundary: one that includes both folkloric figures, like the golem, and historical figures, like the victims of the Holocaust. And though perhaps an uncomfortable interplay of historical reality and cultural representation, the relationship between the Holocaust and American popular culture yields important insight into postwar American response to the Holocaust. My work considers the way in which Yiddish language, Jewish culture, and Holocaust testimony have been incorporated into the wider American consciousness via popular media representation.

Cohen, Sara Simcha

Kaufman, Eleanor

UCLA

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

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