1. Secret Agents: Visions of Escape, Glimpses of Hope
2. Do We Still Want to Believe?: The X-Files and the American Struggle with Progressive Action
3. Perhaps Today: The Dialectic of Despair and Activism in Popular Evangelical Literature
4. God's Unwanted: Fight Club and the Myth of "Total Revolution"
5. Relocating the American Dream: The Challenges and Ambiguities of Contemporary Cultural Pessimism
6. The Quest for a Real-World Correlate Sightings of Cultural Pessimism in the Domains of Scholarship and Journalism
7. The Question of Real-World Correlates to Fantasy Processes of Decline: The Deep Structure of Decay, or, Descent into the Engine Room of the RMS Titanic
Epilogue-Into the Great Wide Open