Download or read book Narrating the Mesh written by Marco Caracciolo and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-02-26 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hierarchical model of human societies’ relations with the natural world is at the root of today’s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton’s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena. How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes—from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution—can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters’ mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

Download or read book Narrating Nonhuman Spaces written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-19 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.

Download or read book Puzzling Stories written by Steven Willemsen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many films and novels defy our ability to make sense of the plot. While puzzling storytelling, strange incongruities, inviting enigmas and persistent ambiguities have been central to the effects of many literary and cinematic traditions, a great deal of contemporary films and television series bring such qualities to the mainstream—but wherein lies the attractiveness of perplexing works of fiction? This collected volume offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and trans-medial approach to the question of cognitive challenge in narrative art, bringing together psychological, philosophical, formal-historical, and empirical perspectives from leading scholars across these fields.

Download or read book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities written by Marco Caracciolo and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2022-03 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities investigates how the experience of slowness in contemporary narrative practices can create a vision of interconnectedness between human communities and the nonhuman world. Here, slowness is not a matter of measurable time but a transformative experience for audiences of contemporary narratives engaging with the ecological crisis. While climate change is a scientific abstraction, the imagination of slowness turns it into a deeply embodied and affective experience. Marco Caracciolo explores the value of slowness in dialogue with a wide range of narratives in various media, from prose fiction to comic books to video games. He argues that we need patience and an eye for complex patterns in order to recognize the multiple threads that link human communities and the slow-moving processes of climate and geological history. Decelerating attention offers important insight into human societies' relations with the nonhuman materialities of Earth's physical landscapes, ecosystems, and atmosphere. Caracciolo centers the experiential effects of narrative and offers a range of theoretically grounded readings that complement the formal language of narrative theory. These close readings demonstrate that slowness is not a matter of measurable time but a "thickening" of attention that reveals the deeply multithreaded nature of reality. The importance of this realization cannot be overstated: through an investment in the here and now of experience, slow narrative can help us manage the uncertainty of living in an era marked by dramatically shifting climate patterns.

Download or read book Narrating Nonhuman Spaces written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2023-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent debates about the Anthropocene have prompted a re-negotiation of the relationship between human subjectivity and nonhuman matter within a wide range of disciplines. This collection builds on the assumption that our understanding of the nonhuman world is bound up with the experience of space: thinking about and with nonhuman spaces destabilizes human-scale assumptions. Literary form affords this kind of nonanthropocentric experience; one role of the critic in the Anthropocene is to foreground the function of space and description in challenging the conventional link between narrative and human (inter)subjectivity. Bringing together New Formalism, ecocriticism, and narrative theory, the included essays demonstrate that literature can transgress the strong and long-established boundary of the human frame that literary and narrative scholarship clings to. The focus is firmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fiction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them.

Download or read book Narrative Factuality written by Monika Fludernik and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with the fictional narratives of literature, such as novels or short stories. But narrative is a transdisciplinary and transmedial concept whose manifestations encompass both the fictional and the factual. In this volume, which provides a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe’s Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, the use of narrative to convey true and reliable information is systematically explored across media, cultures and disciplines, as well as in its narratological, stylistic, philosophical, and rhetorical dimensions. At a time when the notion of truth has come under attack, it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narrative, and to examine critically the foundations of this commitment. But because it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narratives, thereby providing insights into the nature of narrative fiction that could not be reached from the narrowly literary perspective of early narratology.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory written by Paul Dawson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 781 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory brings together top scholars in the field to explore the significance of narrative to pressing social, cultural, and theoretical issues. How does narrative both inform and limit the way we think today? From conspiracy theories and social media movements to racial politics and climate change future scenarios, the reach is broad. This volume is distinctive for addressing the complicated relations between the interdisciplinary narrative turn in the academy and the contemporary boom of instrumental storytelling in the public sphere. The scholars collected here explore new theories of causality, experientiality, and fictionality; challenge normative modes of storytelling; and offer polemical accounts of narrative fiction, nonfiction, and video games. Drawing upon the latest research in areas from cognitive sciences to complexity theory, the volume provides an accessible entry point for those new to the myriad applications of narrative theory and a point of departure for new scholarship.

Download or read book How to Do Things with Narrative written by Jan Alber and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume combines narratological analyses with an investigation of the ideological ramifications of the use of narrative strategies. The collected essays do not posit any intrinsic or stable connection between narrative techniques and world views. Rather, they demonstrate that world views are inevitably expressed through highly specific formal strategies. This insight leads the contributors to investigate why and how particular narrative techniques are employed and under what conditions.

Download or read book Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do physical things differ from non-things—human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis—that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted.

Download or read book On Soulsring Worlds written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-26 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length study devoted to FromSoftware games, On Soulsring Worlds explores how the Dark Souls series and Elden Ring are able to reconcile extreme difficulty in both gameplay and narrative with broad appeal. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary audiences and designed to tap into the new forms of interpretation afforded by digital media, the author situates the games vis-à-vis a number of current debates, including the posthuman and the ethics of gameplay. The book delivers an object lesson on the value of narrative (and) complexity in digital play and in the interpretive practices it gives rise to. Cross-fertilizing narrative theory, game studies, and nonhuman-oriented philosophy, this book will appeal to students and scholars of game studies, media studies, narratology, and video game ethnography.

Download or read book Storying the Ecocatastrophe written by Helena Duffy and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of narrative to become a viable political force. The collection of essays achieves this by examining the representational strategies and ideological goals of contemporary cultural productions about climate change. These productions have been created across different genres, such as the traditional novel, dance performance, solarpunk, economic report, collage, and space opera, as well as across different languages and cultures. The volume’s twelve chapters demonstrate that rising temperatures, erratic weather, extinction of species, depletion of resources, and coastal erosion and flooding are an effect of our abusive relationship with nature. They also show that our use of nuclear power, extraction of natural resources and extensive farming, including heavy reliance on pesticides, intersect with intrahuman violence, as fleshed out by heteropatriarchy, racism, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism. They finally argue that human activity has indirectly contributed to other contemporary crises, namely the migrant crisis and the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid-19.

Download or read book Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism written by Stefan Herbrechter and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-28 with total page 1233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism is a major reference work on the paradigm emerging from the challenges to humanism, humanity, and the human posed by the erosion of the traditional demarcations between the human and nonhuman. This handbook surveys and speculates on the ways in which the posthumanist paradigm emerged, transformed, and might further develop across the humanities. With its focus on the posthuman as a figure, on posthumanism as a social discourse, and on posthumanisation as an on-going historical and ontological process, the volume highlights the relationship between the humanities and sciences. The essays engage with posthumanism in connection with subfields like the environmental humanities, health humanities, animal studies, and disability studies. The book also traces the historical representations and understanding of posthumanism across time. Additionally, the contributions address genre and forms such as autobiography, games, art, film, museums, and topics such as climate change, speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitics to name a few. This handbook considers posthumanism’s impact across disciplines and areas of study.

Download or read book Ecocriticism written by Greg Garrard and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-29 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism explores the ways in which we imagine and portray the relationship between humans and the environment across many areas of cultural production, including Romantic poetry, wildlife documentaries, climate models, the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, and novels by Margaret Atwood, Kim Scott, Barbara Kingsolver and Octavia Butler. Greg Garrard’s animated and accessible volume responds to the diversity of the field today and explores its key concepts, including: pollution pastoral wilderness apocalypse animals Indigeneity the Earth. Thoroughly revised to reflect the breadth and diversity of twenty-first-century environmental writing and criticism, this edition addresses climate change and justice throughout, and features a new chapter on Indigeneity. It also presents a glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading. Concise, clear and authoritative, Ecocriticism offers the ideal introduction to this crucial subject for students of literary and cultural studies.

Download or read book Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty First Century Anglophone Novel written by Yvonne Liebermann and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-09-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an overview on the growing field of nonhuman studies in relation to Anglophone novels. It illuminates the variety of nonhuman actors that take centre stage in the twenty-first-century novel and the formal changes that the Anthropocene, the digital turn, the animal rights movement, and research into plant consciousness have brought to the novel as a form. The book is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different aspect of twenty-first-century literature that engages with the nonhuman. The collection investigates how the environmental changes and the increasing use of AI technologies have fostered the flourishing of genres like the New Weird, Climate Fiction, and speculative fiction, how it makes us embrace new perceptions of life in relation to genetic engineering, and how it forces us to engage with newly emerging political contexts.

Download or read book Cli Fi and Class written by Debra J. Rosenthal and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-10-18 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its emergence in the late twentieth century, climate fiction—or cli-fi—has concerned itself as much with economic injustice and popular revolt as with rising seas and soaring temperatures. Indeed, with its insistent focus on redressing social disparities, cli-fi might reasonably be classified as a form of protest literature. As environmental crises escalate and inequality intensifies, literary writers and scholars alike have increasingly scrutinized the dual exploitations of the earth’s ecosystems and the socioeconomically disadvantaged. Cli-Fi and Class focuses on the representation of class dynamics in climate-change narratives. With fifteen essays on the intersection of the economic and the ecological—addressing works ranging from the novels of Joseph Conrad, Cormac McCarthy, and Octavia Butler to the film Black Panther and the Broadway musical Hadestown —this collection unpacks the complex ways economic exploitation impacts planetary well-being, and the ways climatic change shapes those inequities in turn.

Download or read book The Queerness of Water written by Jeremy Chow and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-06-26 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This highly original book reconsiders canonical long eighteenth-century narratives through the conjoined lenses of queer studies and the environmental humanities. Moving from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to Gothic novels including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jeremy Chow investigates the role that bodies of water play in reading these central texts. Chow navigates various representations and phases of water to magnify the element’s furtive yet pronounced effects on narrative, theory, and identity. Water, Chow reveals, is both a participant and a stage upon which bodily violation manifests. The sea, rivers, pools, streams, and glaciers all participate in a violent decolonialism that fractures, revises, and reshapes notions of colonial masculinity emerging throughout the long eighteenth century. Through an innovative series of intermezzi, The Queerness of Water also traces the afterlives of eighteenth-century literature in late twentienth- and twenty-first-century film, television, and other popular media, opening up conversations regarding canon, literary criticism, pedagogy, and climate change.

Download or read book Climate Change and Original Sin written by Katherine Cox and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2023-06-28 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the Enlightenment era, how was the human-climate relationship conceived? Focusing on the most recent epoch in which belief in an animate environment still widely prevailed, Climate Change and Original Sin argues that an ecologically inflected moral system assumed that humanity bore responsibility for climate corruption and volatility. The environmental problem initiated by original sin is not only that humans alienated themselves from nature but also that satanic powers invaded the world and corrupted its elements—particularly the air. Milton shared with contemporaries the widespread view that storms and earthquakes represented the work of fearsome spiritual agents licensed to inflict misery on humans as penalty for sin. Katherine Cox’s work discerns in Paradise Lost an ecological fall distinct from, yet concurrent with, the human fall. In examining Milton’s evolving representations of the climate, this book also traces the gradual development of ideas about the atmosphere during the seventeenth century—a change in the intellectual climate driven by experimental activity and heralding an ecologically devastating shift in Western attitudes toward the air.