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Sublime Extinctions in Anthropocene Fiction: Literary representations of geologic force in works by Ballard, McCarthy and Watkins

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Author

  • Samuel Teeland

Summary, in English

This essay examines representations of extinction in a selection of Anthropocene fiction. The Anthropocene is a potential new geological epoch, in which the human species capacity for massive ecological transformation is rivalling that of geologic processes. As the Anthropocene has grown into a subject of cultural significance, critical literary scholarship has identified implications for a possible Anthropocene fiction. A representational challenge in this regard is how to render extinction comprehensible in literature. This essay examines how extinction is manifested as a representational problem for literature in three fictional works. It explores scale, threshold and continuity in J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962); archive, absence and futurity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); and speculation, desire and the rhetorical device of catalog in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015). I argue that these representational limits are explicable through the concept of the sublime, which in the Anthropocene occurs in response to significantly different relational terms to the nonhuman other.

Department/s

Publishing year

2018

Language

English

Document type

Student publication for Bachelor's degree

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures
  • Cultural Sciences

Keywords

  • Anthropocene
  • Extinction
  • Sublime
  • J.G. Ballard
  • Cormac McCarthy
  • Claire Vaye Watkins

Supervisor

  • Cian Duffy (Professor)