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Taking up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies, this volume engages with what is traditionally understood as Anthropocene fiction and highlights the questions these fictions ask of extinction, while simultaneously bringing texts typically not thought of as Anthropocene fiction into fruitful discourse.
List of contents
Acknowledgments.........................................................
Introduction: The Urgency of Story During the Sixth Mass Extinction
Jonathan Elmore...................................................
Chapter 1: Telling Stories about Dying (Out): Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels and the
Anthropocene Extinction
Michael Fuchs....................................................
Chapter 2: "Life Finds a Way": Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, and Extinction Anxiety
Christy Tidwell...................................................
Chapter 3: "The Integrity of Nature": A Comparative Analysis of Environmental Anxieties in the
Fictions of H.P. Lovecraft and Jeff VanderMeer
Kristen Figgins....................................................
Chapter 4: "My heart slowly cracks": Making Kin and Living through Extinction in Erdrich's
Future Home of the Living God
Bridgitte Barclay.................................................
Chapter 5: "You are Here": Extinction as Familial in The Broken Earth
Erin DeYoung...................................................
Chapter 6: The Uncanny, the Weird, and the Eerie: Hyperobjects and Anthropocenic Modalities
in China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion
Allan Rae.........................................................
Chapter 7: The Tragi-Comedy of Life: A Posthumanist Reading of Species Extinction in
Éric Chevillard's Sans-l'orang-outan
Christina Lord....................................................
Chapter 8: Godly Mass Extinction: Robert J. Sawyer's Calculating God and Extinction's
Teleologies
Jenni G. Halpin..................................................
About the Contributors
About the author
Jonathan Elmore is assistant professor of English at Savannah State University.
Summary
Taking up the collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction studies, this volume engages with what is traditionally understood as Anthropocene fiction and highlights the questions these fictions ask of extinction, while simultaneously bringing texts typically not thought of as Anthropocene fiction into fruitful discourse.
Additional text
Among the myriad catastrophes facing our world, there is perhaps none more significant, or more difficult to contemplate, than the prospect of a sixth mass extinction wrought by human action. The annihilation of our fellow Earthlings is tragedy of a different order from the related concepts of anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene, and their most devastating conclusion. As the essays collected here dramatize, weighing the implications of this rending of the web of life forces us to confront the question of what species are, why they are valuable, and what it means to be human. In thinking about the implications of the sixth extinction for human storytelling, they seek to intervene in this most tragic of narratives, in hopes of forging an alternate ending.
