Dr Alan Gibbs, School of English, UCC

School of English and Digitial Humanities

4 March 2020

O'Rahilly Building, 2.12, UCC

Taking as case studies Dave Eggers’ 2014 novel, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? and the 2016 HBO mini-series, The Night Of, this paper explores a resurgence of naturalism in 21st-century American cultural production. The turbulence of American public life during this period – including 9/11, the financial crash, and living under neoliberalism – has encouraged artists to explore the deterministic narrative forms of naturalism, which tend to place their protagonists at the mercy of forces greater than themselves.