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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Justin Chandler is the assistant director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a PhD in literature and an MFA in creative writing and pedagogy from Miami University of Ohio. His scholarship has appeared in Studies in American Fiction and won the 2023 Arthur O. Lewis Award from the Society for Utopian Studies. His fiction has appeared in Story and epiphany.

Abstract

The author reads W. E. B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” as a subversion of the literary apocalypse, one that signals its author’s growing disillusionment with the promises of racial progress and liberal humanism. First published in the collection Darkwater in 1920, then republished in Afro-American Magazine in 1953, “The Comet” details the destruction of New York City by a passing comet. Yet a close reading of key moments in the story reveals that Du Bois’s subversion of this literary form enables him to explore several alternative breaks within that fundamental break that is apocalypse. Reading these intra-apocalyptic breaks through the work of Fred Moten and Walter Benjamin, this essay charts Du Bois’s use of the apocalypse as a dialectical tool to interrogate the status of the liberal humanist subject, the utopian promise of a future severed from its past(s), and the commonsense notion of a natural bedrock of reality beneath the mediated, ideologically conditioned present. The essay concludes with a consideration of “The Comet” as offering a new way to conceive of the literary apocalypse, one that turns our attention away from the scholarly fixation on a cataclysmic break and toward a vision of the present as a site of ongoing rupture, remembrance, and revision.

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