Adam Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions
Post by Eliot Storer, Rice Anthropology To be released in April 2015, Adam Trexler’s Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (University of Virginia Press) is one of the broadest surveys of climate change literature to date. An independent scholar, Trexler surveys over 150 climate change novels that cut across history, genre, and register in order to […]
Robert Markley on Jane Austen, Deep Time, and Sustainability – Feb 21st at 4pm
The English Department presents Robert Markley, W.D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. 4:00 pm Friday, February 21, 2014 Humanities Room 119 “The Unsustainable Estate: Imagining ‘Nature’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park ” In the late eighteenth century, traditional notions of time and history came under pressure from work in three emerging sciences: […]
Cli Fi Noir, From Finland with Foreboding
Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer is set in Helsinki in the near future, perhaps two or three decades from now, but it portrays a world that is hardly recognizable. Finland, like every other European nation, has become a failed state due to the influx of millions of climate migrants, with its own citizens abandoning urban centers […]
Post-Petroleum Energy Regimes in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
While the concept of apocalypse has long been a generative and motivating trope for environmental-minded authors, filmmakers, thinkers, and activists, it has also prevented a certain kind of future-oriented imagination. Unless one is predicting an extinction-level event, or a planet that is literally uninhabitable, the slippery conceptual slope between “catastrophe” and “apocalypse” prevents many authors […]