Forsaken Things

Forsaken Things explores how three late modernist writers turned to objects, environments, and creaturely life to make sense of history and our perception of the world. Responding critically to the recent, influential ‘nonhuman turn’ in literary studies, the book advances a conception of ‘late modernism’ based on the relationship between materiality and language in the work of Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, and Olga Tokarczuk, compared together here for the first time and covering the period from the Second World War to the present day. For all three writers, the category of the ‘human’ has disintegrated and become unsustainable in the twentieth century, leading them to reimagine our relationship with ‘things’ and nonhuman life. Through reading of materialities like waste and ruins and the representation of the nonhuman, the book demonstrates how this relationship is essentially an aesthetic, political, and ethical one, providing insight into the violent ways in which modernity dispenses with human and nonhuman alike. Forsaken Things enters into critical conversation with literary object studies and ecocriticism while revisiting the ethical, ecological, and political assumptions of the ‘nonhuman turn’ in literature and philosophy.