This special session explores public emotions that were occluded during the rise and fall of 'doomerism.' In any future obituary for this word, some attention needs to be paid to its multiple points of emergence. Though often believed to have entered the mainstream around 2008 in internet discussions about societal collapse after 'peak oil,' doomerism, it can be argued, has a much longer history: consider the USENET groups forecasting the catastrophe of Y2K; or, before then, the 1947 Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; or indeed long before, the first street prophet to holler that the end is nigh. Today, however, doomerism is taken to include all kinds of things — fear directed not just at climate catastrophe, but also at war, disease, and autonomous technology. Yet this diffusion of reference may mark doomerism’s apogee less than its belated disintegration.

This special session considers doomerisms in their multiplicity, together with those other non- and counter-doomerist feelings, as a suite of sentiments meriting further scrutiny in the context of the contemporary novel. It proceeds from the following questions: If doomerism wasn’t just a synonym for pessimism, but was instead a historically specific formation of the early 21st century, which half-concealed public feelings may now become visible? And specifically, which such feelings might become visible in long-form fiction? What kinds of sadness and anger, camaraderie and critique, have emerged? Which feelings about the future, proleptic and anticipatory, are now also unobscured? Aren’t there also emotions associated with indifference, naive optimism, narcissism, solipsism, and aversion: all feelings that were normalized as the ostensibly healthful alternatives to pathological pessimism? Meanwhile, weren’t some doomerist feelings masked behind mass media’s columbian ‘discoveries’ of racism and of public health in the years since 2020 — feelings less accurately linked to liberalism or progressivism than to extreme political reaction? If so, could these latter, reactionary doomerisms be best exemplified in Donald Trump's Super Tuesday declaration that "our country is dying," and include white supremacist terror of ethnic replacement, the misogynist and trans-misogynist passion for gender-normative order, the hyper-capitalist marketization of ‘self-care’ and ‘human flourishing,’ the anti-communitarian suspicion of medical science, or the hyper-communitarian watchfulness embodied in doorbell cameras and border patrols?

Historian of technology Zachary Loeb begins the session by outlining a genealogy of techno-scientific doomerism, what political interests have coalesced in it and what resentments have sprung from its dissolution, in the trajectory “From Apocalyptic Romanticism to Apocalyptic Disappointment.” Matt Tierney tracks a parallel transformation “From Outrageous Emptiness to Shared Grace” by focusing on Richard Powers’s 2021 novel Bewilderment, whose fictive critique of techno-scientific progress narratives pairs an indistinction between programmatic and aesthetic politics with an indistinction between intellection and emotion. Zooming further in, Melanie Abeygunawardana theorizes the “Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling,” a dynamic between flat affect and sensational flesh in Ling Ma’s 2018 book Severance, a millennial zombie novel that animates the ruinous ends of neoliberal racial colorblindness. Finally, Sheila Liming reads Christine Lai's 2023 novel Landscapes for a concept of “Aesthetic Abandonment,” the condition of apocalyptic life that would make art, or its preservation, impossible.

In four papers of ten to twelve minutes each, occupying perspectives of (disciplinary, racial, methodological, and career stage) diversity, our speakers address poetic and aesthetic feelings to rebut the tendentious and uneven distribution of calamity. With strict timekeeping, we will have a full half hour for discussion following initial paper presentations. This will mean plenty of time for conversation at both the large historical scale and the more minute scale of textual analysis.