Keetley's Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human

“We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human

Edited by Dawn Keetley

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7628-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-4766-1452-6
notes, bibliography, index
256pp. softcover (6 x 9) 2014
Price: $35.00

About the Book
This edited collection brings together an introduction and 13 original scholarly essays on AMC’s The Walking Dead. The essays in the first section address the pervasive bloodletting of the series: What are the consequences of the series’ unremitting violence? Essays explore violence committed in self-defense, racist violence, mass lawlessness, the violence of law enforcement, the violence of mourning, and the violence of history.

The essays in the second section explore an equally urgent question: What does it mean to be human? Several argue that notions of the human must acknowledge the centrality of the body—the fact that we share a “blind corporeality” with the zombie. Others address how the human is closely aligned with language and time, the disappearance of which are represented by the aphasic, timeless zombie.

Underlying each essay are the game-changing words of The Walking Dead’s protagonist Rick Grimes to the other survivors: “We’re all infected.” The violence of the zombie is also our violence; their blind drives are also ours. The human characters of The Walking Dead may try to define themselves against the zombies but in the end their bodies harbor the zombie virus: they are the walking dead.


Table of Contents

Preface  1
Introduction: "We’re All Infected" (Dawn Keetley)  3
Part I: Society’s End
The Zombie Apocalypse Is Upon Us! Homeland Insecurity (Philip L. Simpson)  28
Burying the Living with the Dead: Security, Survival and the Sanction of Violence (Steven Pokornowski)  41
Walking Tall or Walking Dead? The American Cowboy in the Zombie Apocalypse (P. Ivan Young)  56
Asserting Law and Order Over the Mindless (Angus Nurse)  68
Rest in Pieces: Violence in Mourning the (Un)Dead (Laura Kremmel)  80
Roadside "Vigil" for the Dead: Cannibalism, Fossil Fuels and the American Dream (Christine Heckman)  95
Mass Shock Therapy for Atlanta’s Psych(ot)ic Suburban Legacy (Paul Boshears)  110
Part II: Posthumanity
Apocalyptic Utopia: The Zombie and the (r)Evolution of Subjectivity (Chris Boehm)  126
Nothing But the Meat: Posthuman Bodies and the Dying Undead (Xavier Aldana Reyes)  142
Human Choice and Zombie Consciousness (Dawn Keetley)  156
"Talking Bodies" in a Zombie Apocalypse: From the Discursive to the Shitty Sublime (Gary Farnell)  173
Zombie Time: Temporality and Living Death (Gwyneth Peaty)  186
Afterword: Bye-Gone Days: Reflections on Romero, Kirkman and What We Become (Dave Beisecker)  201
Bibliography  215
List of Episodes  227
About the Contributors  229
Index  233


About the Author(s)
Dawn Keetley works in the department of English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.