Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, approaches the emotional complexities of death and mourning within New York City in wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Set after the death of young Oskar Schell’s father in the World Trade Center, the narrative follows Oskar on a quest for an understanding of loss. Situated in the confines of the city, the novel is an urban exploration for self-identity while faced with the unrecoverable loss of both human life and the iconic image of the city: the Twin Towers. Due to the absence of a physical body, Oskar perceives his father’s gravesite as a meaningless memorial, and he searches the metropolis for an alternative sense of resolution to his mourning. Foer’s narrative proffers an analysis of modern man and the shifting urban territory, where the complexity of place-identity, the individuals interaction with persons and locations, becomes embroiled in the post-9/11 memories and an altered urban fabric. Foer augments the story with photographs, including the iconic ‘falling man’ image that starkly silhouettes an imminent death against the tower. Oskar blends the falling man into a semblance of his father; in doing so, he places his father’s body at a temporal and identifiable place—although now shattered—within the metropolis and moving toward a more conscious engagement with the real, determinedly preserving remembrance of his father. Within this context, I utilize Foer’s novel to argue that our post-9/11 world has altered our cognitive understanding of space in the metropolis, demonstrating the continuing shift in the psychological mindset for coping with both urban life and death.
{"title":"Chasing Death’s Memory: Representational Space in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close","authors":"Wayne E. Arnold","doi":"10.16995/C21.49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.49","url":null,"abstract":"Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, approaches the emotional complexities of death and mourning within New York City in wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Set after the death of young Oskar Schell’s father in the World Trade Center, the narrative follows Oskar on a quest for an understanding of loss. Situated in the confines of the city, the novel is an urban exploration for self-identity while faced with the unrecoverable loss of both human life and the iconic image of the city: the Twin Towers. Due to the absence of a physical body, Oskar perceives his father’s gravesite as a meaningless memorial, and he searches the metropolis for an alternative sense of resolution to his mourning. Foer’s narrative proffers an analysis of modern man and the shifting urban territory, where the complexity of place-identity, the individuals interaction with persons and locations, becomes embroiled in the post-9/11 memories and an altered urban fabric. Foer augments the story with photographs, including the iconic ‘falling man’ image that starkly silhouettes an imminent death against the tower. Oskar blends the falling man into a semblance of his father; in doing so, he places his father’s body at a temporal and identifiable place—although now shattered—within the metropolis and moving toward a more conscious engagement with the real, determinedly preserving remembrance of his father. Within this context, I utilize Foer’s novel to argue that our post-9/11 world has altered our cognitive understanding of space in the metropolis, demonstrating the continuing shift in the psychological mindset for coping with both urban life and death.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115720938","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As twenty-first-century fiction constructs its identity, it must negotiate the inheritance of postmodernism. This article examines a particular strand of postmodernism’s legacy: that of the fairy tale reworkings which were so popular and so influential with writers considered postmodern. I will examine two related shifts apparent in twenty-first-century fiction: from the fairy tale to folklore, and from magic or the marvellous to the Todorovian fantastic. Rather than working with the fairy tales popularised by the Grimms and Disney, recent fictions are engaging with a broader range of folkloric narrative forms: I define the works which do this as folklore-inflected fictions. This change is formally linked to the shift into the fantastic, which I will explore through two recent novels: John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning (2011) and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012). These novels create the fantastic differently, but both use a constellation of folklore, landscape, dreams, and hallucinations to maintain the Todorovian hesitation. Their use of the fantastic is part of the broader move towards a renegotiation of realism which has been emerging in recent fiction and criticism; this article shows how folklore-inflected fictions fit in to this larger trend.
{"title":"How ‘the Old Stories Persist’: Folklore in Literature after Postmodernism","authors":"Sara Helen Binney","doi":"10.16995/C21.69","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.69","url":null,"abstract":"As twenty-first-century fiction constructs its identity, it must negotiate the inheritance of postmodernism. This article examines a particular strand of postmodernism’s legacy: that of the fairy tale reworkings which were so popular and so influential with writers considered postmodern. I will examine two related shifts apparent in twenty-first-century fiction: from the fairy tale to folklore, and from magic or the marvellous to the Todorovian fantastic. Rather than working with the fairy tales popularised by the Grimms and Disney, recent fictions are engaging with a broader range of folkloric narrative forms: I define the works which do this as folklore-inflected fictions. This change is formally linked to the shift into the fantastic, which I will explore through two recent novels: John Burnside’s A Summer of Drowning (2011) and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child (2012). These novels create the fantastic differently, but both use a constellation of folklore, landscape, dreams, and hallucinations to maintain the Todorovian hesitation. Their use of the fantastic is part of the broader move towards a renegotiation of realism which has been emerging in recent fiction and criticism; this article shows how folklore-inflected fictions fit in to this larger trend.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123886436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A review of Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene (2016). Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, Oxon: Routledge, £27.99, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-138-94168-7
{"title":"Review of Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry","authors":"S. Cooper","doi":"10.16995/C21.54","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.54","url":null,"abstract":"A review of Sam Solnick’s Poetry and the Anthropocene (2016). Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene: Ecology, Biology and Technology in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, Oxon: Routledge, £27.99, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-138-94168-7","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"2015 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131136317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Diletta De Cristofaro and Daniel Cordle introduce the special issue on the Literature of the Anthropocene. They provide the context for the issue and flesh out the main concerns of the essays included: form, scale, the reckoning of the human with the non-human, time, and the relationship between the Humanities and the Sciences.
Diletta De Cristofaro和Daniel Cordle介绍了关于人类世文学的特刊。它们为这个问题提供了背景，并充实了文章的主要关注点:形式、规模、人类与非人类的清算、时间以及人文与科学之间的关系。
{"title":"Introduction: the literature of the Anthropocene","authors":"D. Cristofaro, D. Cordle","doi":"10.16995/C21.73","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.73","url":null,"abstract":"Diletta De Cristofaro and Daniel Cordle introduce the special issue on the Literature of the Anthropocene. They provide the context for the issue and flesh out the main concerns of the essays included: form, scale, the reckoning of the human with the non-human, time, and the relationship between the Humanities and the Sciences.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133658234","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I consider how two contemporary graphic novels, Richard McGuire’s Here (2015) and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive (2010), take up the challenge posed by the Anthropocene to represent both geologic and human scales. I argue that graphic novels prove a fruitful site for investigating the capacities of both visual art and literature to respond to such a refiguring of the boundaries of the human subject and narrative. While the most commercially popular and frequently studied texts in climate fiction tend to be novels or films, I turn from considering the patterns of genre fiction to the affordances of form. I explore how the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of the graphic novel form encompass environmental phenomena that are often difficult to visualize elsewhere, stretching beyond human perspectives. In particular, I show how the aesthetics of temporality, or visual time, in graphic novels encourages readings that take notice of the nonhuman presence in plots and narrative events. In arguing for the environmental, more-than-human implications of visual time in the graphic novel form, I focus on how representations of domestic habits and daily routines in Here and Radioactive are articulated within and implicated by unruly scales of time and space (too small and too large to contain). I argue that the aesthetics of time in the form of the graphic novel address representational challenges central to the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and slow violence, in particular, the mediation between the planetary and the domestic.
{"title":"Anthroposcenes: Towards an Environmental Graphic Novel","authors":"L. Perry","doi":"10.16995/C21.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.37","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I consider how two contemporary graphic novels, Richard McGuire’s Here (2015) and Lauren Redniss’s Radioactive (2010), take up the challenge posed by the Anthropocene to represent both geologic and human scales. I argue that graphic novels prove a fruitful site for investigating the capacities of both visual art and literature to respond to such a refiguring of the boundaries of the human subject and narrative. While the most commercially popular and frequently studied texts in climate fiction tend to be novels or films, I turn from considering the patterns of genre fiction to the affordances of form. I explore how the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of the graphic novel form encompass environmental phenomena that are often difficult to visualize elsewhere, stretching beyond human perspectives. In particular, I show how the aesthetics of temporality, or visual time, in graphic novels encourages readings that take notice of the nonhuman presence in plots and narrative events. In arguing for the environmental, more-than-human implications of visual time in the graphic novel form, I focus on how representations of domestic habits and daily routines in Here and Radioactive are articulated within and implicated by unruly scales of time and space (too small and too large to contain). I argue that the aesthetics of time in the form of the graphic novel address representational challenges central to the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and slow violence, in particular, the mediation between the planetary and the domestic.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125657788","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay I explore the profound and specific fastening of horror to the Anthropocene by considering both scientific and philosophical responses to our contemporary moment. I then take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a case study of the Anthropocene horror story, analysed in relation to the four stages of horror as defined by John Clute. This close reading of the The Road reveals a problem with the horror of the Anthropocene: just like the road down which the man and boy travel, it takes us nowhere. I end with a critical engagement with Donna Haraway’s coinage of an alternative descriptor – the Chthulucene – arguing that it remains haunted by horror. I conclude that the challenge remains to think the affect of the horror of the Anthropocene whilst conceiving of stories that will move us beyond it.
{"title":"The Horror of the Anthropocene","authors":"Sarah Dillon","doi":"10.16995/C21.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.38","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay I explore the profound and specific fastening of horror to the Anthropocene by considering both scientific and philosophical responses to our contemporary moment. I then take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a case study of the Anthropocene horror story, analysed in relation to the four stages of horror as defined by John Clute. This close reading of the The Road reveals a problem with the horror of the Anthropocene: just like the road down which the man and boy travel, it takes us nowhere. I end with a critical engagement with Donna Haraway’s coinage of an alternative descriptor – the Chthulucene – arguing that it remains haunted by horror. I conclude that the challenge remains to think the affect of the horror of the Anthropocene whilst conceiving of stories that will move us beyond it.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132690139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay examines the role of waste objects in J.G. Ballard’s critique of neoliberalism in Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come.1 It focuses on the ways in which waste matter resists the reader’s—and characters’—gaze, obstructs the flow of capital, and/or enlivens them to the eerie underside of the streamlined systems that make up the societies in these texts. To approach these questions, I combine historical materialist, Structural anthropological, and New Materialist approaches to waste. Waste, I argue, requires a multi-dimensional framework that takes into account the interrelation of socio-economic, psycho-pathological and tribal ramifications as well as an understanding of its relationship to the natural world. It is ultimately more fruitful to examine Ballard’s waste objects both as allegories and as elements enmeshed in a wider framework (one that often eludes the imperialist aspirations of the human beings involved) than to choose one interpretative mode over the other. It allows us to consider the extent to which both the plotlines of Ballard’s novels and the ideas they put forth are contingent upon not only the circulation of objects between people—their ‘social life’, as Appadurai would term it—but their interrelation with the environment of which they are a part. In his exploration of capital, power, and the built environment, Ballard seizes upon the fact that matter—both manufactured and natural—exists even when we are not looking at it, and that this life beyond the social has significant repercussions.
{"title":"‘The Problem of This Trash Society’: Anthropogenic Waste and the Neoliberal City in Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come","authors":"R. Dini","doi":"10.16995/C21.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.27","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the role of waste objects in J.G. Ballard’s critique of neoliberalism in Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come.1 It focuses on the ways in which waste matter resists the reader’s—and characters’—gaze, obstructs the flow of capital, and/or enlivens them to the eerie underside of the streamlined systems that make up the societies in these texts. To approach these questions, I combine historical materialist, Structural anthropological, and New Materialist approaches to waste. Waste, I argue, requires a multi-dimensional framework that takes into account the interrelation of socio-economic, psycho-pathological and tribal ramifications as well as an understanding of its relationship to the natural world. It is ultimately more fruitful to examine Ballard’s waste objects both as allegories and as elements enmeshed in a wider framework (one that often eludes the imperialist aspirations of the human beings involved) than to choose one interpretative mode over the other. It allows us to consider the extent to which both the plotlines of Ballard’s novels and the ideas they put forth are contingent upon not only the circulation of objects between people—their ‘social life’, as Appadurai would term it—but their interrelation with the environment of which they are a part. In his exploration of capital, power, and the built environment, Ballard seizes upon the fact that matter—both manufactured and natural—exists even when we are not looking at it, and that this life beyond the social has significant repercussions.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129811196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ursula K. Heise in ‘Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies’ critiques ‘the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems’ (Heise, 2008: 383). This essay places Heise’s critique of the ‘ecological family romance’ in conversation with three other ecological domestic fictions: T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). Heise’s critique and Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers (2010) frame my close readings of the novels’ interconnected themes of radical homemaking, transnationalism, and environmentalism. My reading of the novels highlights their shared use of marginalized, racially-other characters to develop their entwined romantic and environmental plots (Lalitha in Freedom, several minor characters in A Friend of the Earth, and Ovid in Flight Behavior) and their use of sentimental deaths, especially of key female characters (Lalitha in Freedom, Sierra in A Friend of the Earth, and Dellarobia’s uncertain fate in Flight Behavior). By adopting the sentimental, domestic romance plot for ecological aims, the three novels highlight how environmental aims get stymied when cultural and ecological diversity are relegated to the margins. They also suggest that more is gained than lost through their use of ecological allegory. While the fictions do not offer solutions, they do push their readers to confront the Anthropocene’s ecological realities and their radical domestic-environmental politics.
{"title":"Radical Homemaking in Contemporary American Environmental Fiction","authors":"Kris Jacobson","doi":"10.16995/C21.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.31","url":null,"abstract":"Ursula K. Heise in ‘Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies’ critiques ‘the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems’ (Heise, 2008: 383). This essay places Heise’s critique of the ‘ecological family romance’ in conversation with three other ecological domestic fictions: T. C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012). Heise’s critique and Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers (2010) frame my close readings of the novels’ interconnected themes of radical homemaking, transnationalism, and environmentalism. My reading of the novels highlights their shared use of marginalized, racially-other characters to develop their entwined romantic and environmental plots (Lalitha in Freedom, several minor characters in A Friend of the Earth, and Ovid in Flight Behavior) and their use of sentimental deaths, especially of key female characters (Lalitha in Freedom, Sierra in A Friend of the Earth, and Dellarobia’s uncertain fate in Flight Behavior). By adopting the sentimental, domestic romance plot for ecological aims, the three novels highlight how environmental aims get stymied when cultural and ecological diversity are relegated to the margins. They also suggest that more is gained than lost through their use of ecological allegory. While the fictions do not offer solutions, they do push their readers to confront the Anthropocene’s ecological realities and their radical domestic-environmental politics.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127907502","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Through a close reading of McKenzie Wark’s theoretical treatise Molecular Red (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora (2015), this essay examines how Anthropocene knowledge practices challenge our conceptions of human agency in provocative and potentially productive ways. For example, our knowledge of climate science arises through global material infrastructures. As material components of Anthropocene knowledge practices, these infrastructures reveal the material labors and cyborg structures by means of which our knowledge is produced. Wark sees the heterogenous materiality of Anthropocene knowledge practices as evidence for the value of ‘low theories’ based on a ‘labor point of view.’ At the same time, Anthropocene knowledge practices reveal ‘eco-logical’ complexities and fundamental recognitions of the ‘intra-action’ of entangled matter. These complexities produce very estranged views of human agency. Robinson’s novel highlights the eco-logical implications of contemporary knowledge practices by imagining an interstellar ship that must function as a completely artificial ecosystem for a 170-year voyage to another solar system. The significance of knowledge practices and eco-logical complexity is most evident when failures or crises arise, and Aurora tells the story of many such failures. However, I argue that Robinson’s novel and Wark’s ‘low theory’ ultimately function as hopeful accounts of Anthropocene knowledge practices. Among other things, these practices show the material importance of storytelling and point the way toward more complexly realist theories of human agency.
{"title":"Anthropocene Knowledge Practices in McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora","authors":"Gib Prettyman","doi":"10.16995/C21.36","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.36","url":null,"abstract":"Through a close reading of McKenzie Wark’s theoretical treatise Molecular Red (2015) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora (2015), this essay examines how Anthropocene knowledge practices challenge our conceptions of human agency in provocative and potentially productive ways. For example, our knowledge of climate science arises through global material infrastructures. As material components of Anthropocene knowledge practices, these infrastructures reveal the material labors and cyborg structures by means of which our knowledge is produced. Wark sees the heterogenous materiality of Anthropocene knowledge practices as evidence for the value of ‘low theories’ based on a ‘labor point of view.’ At the same time, Anthropocene knowledge practices reveal ‘eco-logical’ complexities and fundamental recognitions of the ‘intra-action’ of entangled matter. These complexities produce very estranged views of human agency. Robinson’s novel highlights the eco-logical implications of contemporary knowledge practices by imagining an interstellar ship that must function as a completely artificial ecosystem for a 170-year voyage to another solar system. The significance of knowledge practices and eco-logical complexity is most evident when failures or crises arise, and Aurora tells the story of many such failures. However, I argue that Robinson’s novel and Wark’s ‘low theory’ ultimately function as hopeful accounts of Anthropocene knowledge practices. Among other things, these practices show the material importance of storytelling and point the way toward more complexly realist theories of human agency.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131449067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay places Coetzee’s writing within the context of the recent posthumanist debate concerning the distinction between human and non-human animals, whose contributors include Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe. I propose a reading of the figures of animals in Coetzee’s recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), which contributes to the questioning of the divide, particularly with reference to such markers of the limits between humanity and animality as taste. Coetzee’s characters from his recent novels are an exercise in the adoption of non-anthropocentric positions: they transgress and contest the borders between the human and the non-human configured as angelic, divine, animalistic, or non-material. Coetzee’s recent novels question the divide and suggest new ways of understanding the human–non-human continuum. By rejecting binary divisions between human and non-human animals, Coetzee’s prose illustrates the idea of entanglement, in which light his characters cannot be perceived as traditional agents endowed with unified identities, but rather, must be seen as radically entangled, with matter and meaning inextricably connected.
{"title":"Belonging to the Human and Non-human Animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Recent Novels","authors":"Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice","doi":"10.16995/C21.29","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/C21.29","url":null,"abstract":"This essay places Coetzee’s writing within the context of the recent posthumanist debate concerning the distinction between human and non-human animals, whose contributors include Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe. I propose a reading of the figures of animals in Coetzee’s recent novels, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), which contributes to the questioning of the divide, particularly with reference to such markers of the limits between humanity and animality as taste. Coetzee’s characters from his recent novels are an exercise in the adoption of non-anthropocentric positions: they transgress and contest the borders between the human and the non-human configured as angelic, divine, animalistic, or non-material. Coetzee’s recent novels question the divide and suggest new ways of understanding the human–non-human continuum. By rejecting binary divisions between human and non-human animals, Coetzee’s prose illustrates the idea of entanglement, in which light his characters cannot be perceived as traditional agents endowed with unified identities, but rather, must be seen as radically entangled, with matter and meaning inextricably connected.","PeriodicalId":272809,"journal":{"name":"C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-Century Writings","volume":"6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129163338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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