Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction

Lucy Bond, Ben De Bruyn, Jessica Rapson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138494411
• eBook ISBN: 9781351026161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of 'planetary memory' able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. Authors examine the recent emergence of a literary and cultural imaginary of planetary memory, an imaginary which attempts to give form to the complex interrelations between human and non-human worlds, between local, national, and global concerns, and, perhaps most importantly, between historical and geological pasts, presents and futures. Chapters highlight distinct regions and landscapes of the US - from the Appalachians, to the South West, the Rust Belt, New York City, Alaska, New Orleans and the Rocky Mountains – in order to examine how the ecological, economic and historical specificity of these environments is underpinned by their implication on networks of planetary significance and scope. Overall, the collection aims to study, develop, and recognise new models of cultural memory and anxious anticipation as they emerge and evolve, thus opening new conversations about practices of remembering and remembrance on an increasingly fragile planet. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction
• 1 Future readers: narrating the human in the Anthropocene
• 2 Speculative memory, the planetary and genre fiction
• 3 ‘Family territory’ to the ‘circumference of the earth’: local and planetary memories of climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour
• 4 Writing the liquid city: excavating urban ecologies after Katrina
• 5 Realism 4°. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
• 6 ‘I love Alaska’: posthuman subjectivity and memory on the final frontier of our ecological crisis
• 7 ‘In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated’: scales of mourning and velocities of memory in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust
• 8 Afterword: The time of planetary memory
• Index