Anthropocene Fictions

The Novel in a Time of Climate Change

Adam Trexler

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813936918
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936932
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth's atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth's ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism's theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.

Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

INDEX

activism, 45, 133, 135, 137, 140, 199–200, 204–5; in Flight Behavior (Kingsolver), 227, 229

actor network theory, 56, 58, 69, 74

agency, 7, 23, 58, 166–67; authors and readers, 73; fiction 16, 74; floods, 114; in Heat (Herzog), 147–53; nonhuman, 171, 218; political, 122, 145–46, 188, 236; in “Science in the Capital” series (Robinson), 154–69; in The Windup Girl (Bacigalupi), 215–18

agencies, U.S. government, 148–49, 160–63, 181; Department of Commerce, 165; Department of Energy, 161- 62; Department of Interior, 165; EPA, 40; FBI, 152; NOAA, 163; NSA, 37; NSF 61, 154–69; Treasury Department, 165

Aldiss, Brian, Hothouse, 8

allegory, 46, 48–49, 54

Allen, Myles, 36, 65

alliances, 60, 66–67

Andrews, Sarah, In Cold Pursuit, 81

Antarctica, 10, 43, 80–81, 83, 156, 207

Anthropocene: causes of, 1; economy, 215–19; as episteme, 200–201; narrative, 15, 82; public, 68–69; science of, 1–2

apocalypticism, 49, 79, 102, 115, 118, 137, 151–52, 207

Arctic, 52, 70, 80–83, 158, 162. See also Cussler, Clive, Artic Drift

Arrhenius, Svante, 2

art, 110–11

Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, 18

Atwood, Margaret, 7; Oryx and Crake, 6, 17, 32, 120, 195–96; Year of the Flood, 17, 120, 196

Auel, Jean M., The Land of Painted...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Contextualizing the Climate Change Novel
• One Truth: Science, Culture, and Construction
• Two Place: Deluge, Floods, and Absence
• Three Politics: Opposition, Bureaucracy, and Agency
• Four Eco-nomics: Domesticity, Ecology, and Political Economy
• Conclusion: The Real and the Future
• Notes
• Index