Louise Economides - Böcker

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

Wild Anthropocene examines four key areas—the politics of deep time, neoliberalism's socio-ecological impacts, global population growth and inter-species entanglement—to demonstrate how literature illuminates progressive solutions to Anthropocene challenges. The book argues that technological mitigation of contemporary environmental crises must be complimented by a politics committed to multispecies justice. Central to this new politics is the project of reimagining our relationship with time as something other than its status within capitalist praxis.The book brings together poetry and fiction written by a diverse range of writers to demonstrate how contemporary literature addresses important connections between social oppression and environmental issues. It also critiques techno-managerial visions of the future that celebrate humanity's ever-growing "control" over ecosystems by examining multiple sources of wildness (temporal, environmental and technological) that expose the problematic ideology underwriting such aspirations. Readers will be introduced to a way of understanding the Anthropocene that, while being informed by recent discoveries in earth science and evolutionary biology, also makes a strong case for humanities-based understanding of environmental politics.This interdisciplinary text will be a useful addition to theoretical discussions on the Anthropocene for scholars, researchers and students in the environmental humanities, literary studies, ecocriticism and environmental philosophy.