|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to
focus specifically on fiction's engagements with human driven
extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and
approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with
emerging scholars and traditionally recognized climate fiction
('cli-fi') with texts and media typically not associated with
Anthropocene fictions. The result is a volume that both engages
with and furthers existing work on Anthropocene fiction as well as
laying groundwork for the budding subfield of extinction fiction.
This volume takes up the collective insistence on the centrality of
story to extinction studies. In various and disparate ways, each
chapter engages with the stories we tell about extinction, about
the extinction of animal and plant life, and about the extinction
of human life itself. Answering the call to action of extinction
studies, these chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this
event and what kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions
and values led to this event and which ones could lead out of it;
what relationships between human life and this planet allowed the
sixth mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be
possible.
Fiction and the Sixth Mass Extinction is one of the first works to
focus specifically on fiction's engagements with human driven
extinction. Drawing together a diverse group of scholars and
approaches, this volume pairs established voices in the field with
emerging scholars and traditionally recognized cli-fi with texts
and media typically not associated with Anthropocene fictions. The
result is a volume that both engages with and furthers existing
work on Anthropocene fiction as well as laying groundwork for the
budding subfield of extinction fiction. This volume takes up the
collective insistence on the centrality of story to extinction
studies. In various and disparate ways, each chapter engages with
the stories we tell about extinction, about the extinction of
animal and plant life, and about the extinction of human life
itself. Answering the call to action of extinction studies, these
chapters explore what kinds of humanity caused this event and what
kinds may live through it; what cultural assumptions and values led
to this event and which ones could lead out of it; what
relationships between human life and this planet allowed the sixth
mass extinction and what alternative relationships could be
possible.
The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains
an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary
scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying
SF, but their works are often literary histories. This is the first
book-length study to take into account both French and
Anglo-American intellectual trends, theories, and SF scholarship
and apply them to a corpus of French works. It shows how
contemporary French SF imagines two broad philosophical inquiries
into the powerful, yet terrifying geological age of the
Anthropocene: posthumanism and transhumanism. While the
posthumanist perspective calls attention to the interdependence and
co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of
life, the transhumanist view of coping with the Anthropocene offers
more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of
the human imagination. Given the history of philosophical
thought’s entanglement with literature in France, French SF can
tell us a lot about this existential crisis of Anthropos as both
destroyer and savior of worlds and bodies alike. With a focus on
encounters between humans, nonhumans, and posthumans in selected
works, this book investigates both the immaterial (the
psychological state of the mind) and material (the body) stakes of
posthumanist or transhumanist thinking in French SF.
|
|