Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Tereza Dědinová
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793636648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
In order to demonstrate that speculative fiction provides a valuable contribution to the discussion about the challenges of the Anthropocene, Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction investigates a range of novels whose subject matter pertains to various aspects of the Anthropocene. These include the destruction and protection of the natural environment, the relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of the planet, the role of myth in the shaping of and combat against the Anthropocene, the political dimensions of the Anthropocene, the ensuing threat of the Apocalypse, and the role of post-apocalyptic narratives. To explore these topics our authors examine the works of Patricia Briggs, M.R. Carey, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Stephenie Meyer, China Miéville, James Patterson, Maggie Stiefvater, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Scott Westfield. Their essays demonstrate that speculative fiction, given its ability to pursue scenarios of alternative history and present familiar things in an unfamiliar way, can alter the readers’ perception of their duties and responsibilities towards their communities and the world, so that the threat of human-wrought destruction might ultimately be averted.

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction

Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Tereza Dědinová
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1793636648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book

Book Description
In order to demonstrate that speculative fiction provides a valuable contribution to the discussion about the challenges of the Anthropocene, Images of the Anthropocene in Speculative Fiction investigates a range of novels whose subject matter pertains to various aspects of the Anthropocene. These include the destruction and protection of the natural environment, the relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of the planet, the role of myth in the shaping of and combat against the Anthropocene, the political dimensions of the Anthropocene, the ensuing threat of the Apocalypse, and the role of post-apocalyptic narratives. To explore these topics our authors examine the works of Patricia Briggs, M.R. Carey, Dmitry Glukhovsky, Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, Stephenie Meyer, China Miéville, James Patterson, Maggie Stiefvater, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Scott Westfield. Their essays demonstrate that speculative fiction, given its ability to pursue scenarios of alternative history and present familiar things in an unfamiliar way, can alter the readers’ perception of their duties and responsibilities towards their communities and the world, so that the threat of human-wrought destruction might ultimately be averted.

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction

The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction PDF Author: Maria Lindgren Leavenworth
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000915395
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book

Book Description
The Imagined Arctic in Speculative Fiction explores the ways in which the Arctic is imagined and what function it is made to serve in a selection of speculative fictions: non-mimetic works that start from the implied question "What if?" Spanning slightly more than two centuries of speculative fiction, from the starting point in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to contemporary works that engage with the vast ramifications of anthropogenic climate change, analyses demonstrate how Arctic discourses are supported or subverted and how new Arctics are added to the textual tradition. To illuminate wider lines of inquiry informing the way the world is envisioned, humanity’s place and function in it, and more-than-human entanglements, analyses focus on the function of the actual Arctic and how this function impacts and is impacted by speculative elements. With effects of climate change training the global eye on the Arctic, and as debates around future northern cultural, economic and environmental sustainability intensify, there is a need for a deepened understanding of the discourses that have constructed and are constructing the Arctic. A careful mapping and serious consideration of both past and contemporary speculative visions thus illuminate the role the Arctic has played and may come to play in a diverse set of practices and fields.

Citizen Science Fiction

Citizen Science Fiction PDF Author: Jerome Winter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793621489
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book

Book Description
Citizen Science Fiction argues that science-fiction literature and media can engage and empower individuals to become active and critical participants in citizen science such that they can collaborate meaningfully in the scientific and technological communities, institutions, and industries that deeply shape their everyday lives.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet PDF Author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452954496
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 709

Get Book

Book Description
Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.

Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas

Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas PDF Author: Aidan Power
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319898272
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book

Book Description
Contemporary European Science Fiction Cinemas charts the evolution of European science fiction cinema in the 21st century, a period in which Europe itself has faced myriad crises. Key to this study is an exploration of how European science fiction responds to prevalent issues such as the financial crisis, political extremism and violence, large-scale migration and indeed the potential breakup of the European Union itself. What futures does science fiction cinema envision for Europe? Is it capable of moving beyond dystopian visions of a continent beset by seemingly omnipresent turbulence? Emphasising science fiction’s unique ability to estrange, exploit and reflect upon popular concerns, this book directly engages with such questions, accounting for ongoing mutations in the very nature of the European project as it does so.

The Anthropocene Unconscious

The Anthropocene Unconscious PDF Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839760494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book

Book Description
From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?

Terrorizing Images

Terrorizing Images PDF Author: Charles Ivan Armstrong
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110694034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book

Book Description
It is broadly accepted that “terrorizing” images are often instrumentalized in periods of conflict to serve political interests. This volume proposes that paying attention to how images of trauma and conflict are described in literary texts, i.e. to the rhetorical practice known as “ekphrasis”, is crucial to our understanding of how such images work. The volume’s contributors discuss verbal images of trauma and terror in literary texts both from a contemporary perspective and as historical artefacts in order to illuminate the many different functions of ekphrasis in literature. The articles in this volume reflect the vast developments in the field of trauma studies since the 1990s, a field that has recently broadened to include genres beyond the memoir and testimony and that lends itself well to new postcolonial, feminist, and multimedia approaches. By expanding the scholarly understanding of how images of trauma are described, interpreted, and acted out in literary texts, this collected volume makes a significant contribution to both trauma and memory studies, as well as more broadly to cultural studies.

Writing Our Extinction

Writing Our Extinction PDF Author: Patrick Whitmarsh
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635554
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book

Book Description
Mid-twentieth-century developments in science and technology produced new understandings and images of the planet that circulated the globe, giving rise to a modern ecological consciousness; but they also contributed to accelerating crises in the global environment, including climate change, pollution, and waste. In this new work, Patrick Whitmarsh analyzes postwar narrative fictions that describe, depict, or express the earth from above (the aerial) and below (the subterranean), revealing the ways that literature has engaged this history of vertical science and linked it to increasing environmental precarity, up to and including the extinction of humankind. Whitmarsh examines works by writers such as Don DeLillo, Karen Tei Yamashita, Reza Negarestani, and Colson Whitehead alongside postwar scientific programs including the Space Race, atmospheric and underground nuclear testing, and geological expeditions such as Project Mohole (which attempted to drill to the earth's mantle). As Whitmarsh argues, by focusing readers' attention on the fragility of postwar life through a vertical lens, Anthropocene fiction highlights the interconnections between human behavior and planetary change. These fictions situate industrial history within the much longer narrative of geological time and reframe scientific progress as a story through which humankind writes itself out of existence.

Posthumanity in the Anthropocene

Posthumanity in the Anthropocene PDF Author: Esther Muñoz-González
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000866262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Get Book

Book Description
In this book, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels—The Handmaid’s Tale, the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments—are analyzed from the perspective provided by the combined views of the construction of the posthuman subject in its interactions with science and technology, and the Anthropocene as a cultural field of enquiry. Posthumanist critical concerns try to dismantle anthropocentric notions of the human and defend the need for a closer relationship between humanity and the environment. Supported by the exemplification of the generic characteristics of the cli-fi genre, this book discusses the effects of climate change, at the individual level, and as a collective threat that can lead to a "world without us." Moreover, Margaret Atwood is herself the constant object of extensive academic interest and Posthuman theory is widely taught, researched, and explored in almost every intellectual field. This book is aimed at worldwide readers, not only those interested in Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre, but also those interested in the debate between critical posthumanism and transhumanism, together with the ethical implications of living in the Anthropocene era regarding our daily lives and practices. It will be especially attractive for academics: university teachers, postgraduates, researchers, and college students in general.

Theory for the World to Come

Theory for the World to Come PDF Author: Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145296159X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Get Book

Book Description
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead