Surreal Entanglements

Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction

Louise Economides, Laura Shackelford (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

268 Seiten

2023
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-00374-0 (ISBN)

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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.

Louise Economides is a professor of English and director of the Literature and the Environment program at the University of Montana, Missoula. Laura Shackelford is Associate Professor of English and founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Introduction:

Weird Ecology: VanderMeer’s Anthropocene Fiction

Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford

Node 1: More-than-Human Traces and Symbiotic Monsters – A Posthumanist Politics for the Anthropocene Era?

Chapter 1:

Home on the Strange: The Queering of Place in VanderMeer’s Borne Books

Louise Economides

Chapter 2:

Acceptance and Continuation: Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Hope in the Anthropocene

Arwen Spicer

Chapter 3:

Entangled Care and the Trouble with Making Family in Borne

Samuel Gormley

Chapter 4:

‘Love Your Monsters:’ Anthropocene Discourse and Green" Psychoanalysis in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne and The Strange Bird: A Borne Story

Sydney Lane

Node 2: Materialist Speculation after Quantum Physics

Chapter 5:

Microbiology and Microcosms: Ecosystem and the Body in Shriek: An Afterword

Octavia Cade

Chapter 6:

Strange Matters: More-than-Human Entanglements and Topological Spacetimes

Laura Shackelford

Chapter 7:

Street Smarts for Smart Streets

Rob Coley

Chapter 8:

Tentacular Narrative Webs: Unthinking Humans in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy

Dunja M. Mohr

Node 3: Aesthetics of Perception and Genre Sense; or Politics Made Perceptible

Chapter 9:

Genre Tentacular: Area X and the Southern Neogothic

Lee Rozelle

Chapter 10:

‘Another World, another life:’ Humans, Monsters, and Politics in Predator: South China Sea

Benjamin J. Robertson

Chapter 11:

Can You Describe Its Form? Annihilation and Cinematic Adaptation

Cameron Kunzelman

Chapter 12:

Love in the Time of the Anthropocene: A Conversation Between Alison Sperling and Jeff VanderMeer

Alison Sperling

Erscheinungsdatum	22.12.2022
Reihe/Serie	Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
Zusatzinfo	5 Halftones, black and white; 5 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	517 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
	Technik ► Umwelttechnik / Biotechnologie
ISBN-10	1-032-00374-X / 103200374X
ISBN-13	978-1-032-00374-0 / 9781032003740
Zustand	Neuware