Hearth of Darkness: The Familiar, the Familial, and the Zombie

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. 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. "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. 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. 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. 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. 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. For Agamben, the true witness can only ever be mute. 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. 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. 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.