Narrating Nonhuman Spaces

Narrating Nonhuman Spaces 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 frmly on the contemporary but with strategic samplings in earlier cultural texts (the American transcendentalists, modernist fction) that anticipate present-day anxieties about the nonhuman, while at the same time offering important conceptual tools for working through them. Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fction and other narrative media. He is the author of fve books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (2021). Marlene Karlsson Marcussen holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern Denmark, where she currently is a scientifc assistant. She is the co-editor of How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction (2021) and has published a number of publications on modernism, materiality, and space such as “The Postapocalyptic Motherhood” (2019) and “The Abundance of Things in the Midst of Writing: A Post-Anthropocentric View on Description and Georges Perec’s ‘Still Life/Style Leaf’” (2021). David Rodriguez is a postdoctoral researcher. He holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University. His dissertation, Spaces of Indeterminacy: Aerial Description and Environmental Imagination in 20th Century American Fiction, studies images of the environment in the novels of Willa Cather, Paul Bowles, and Don DeLillo. He has written further about the phenomenology of reading descriptions of the view from above in Frontiers of Narrative Studies and econarratology in English Studies. Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment Series Editors: Scott Slovic and Swarnalatha Rangarajan Titles include: Packing Death in Australian Literature Ecocides and Eco-Sides Iris Ralph Climate Change, Ecological Catastrophe, and the Contemporary Postcolonial Novel Justyna Poray-Wybranowska Mushroom Clouds Ecocritical Approaches to Militarization and the Environment in East Asia Edited by Simon C. Estok, Iping Liang, and Shinji Iwamasa Dystopias and Utopias on Earth and Beyond Feminist Ecocriticism of Science Fiction Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch Ecofeminist Science Fiction International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature Edited by Douglas A. Vakoch Surreal Entanglements Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction Edited by Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford Narrating Nonhuman Spaces Form, Story, and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism Edited by Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and David Rodriguez The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature Victoria Bladen For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledg e.com/Routledge-Studies-in-World-Literatures-and-the-Environment/book - series/ASHER4038 Narrating Nonhuman Spaces Form, Story, and Experience Beyond Anthropocentrism Edited byMarco Caracciolo, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and David Rodriguez First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and David Rodriguez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Marco Caracciolo, Marlene Karlsson Marcussen, and David Rodriguez to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www . taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-032-02101-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-02104-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-18186-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003181866 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Contents List of Contributors vii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 MARCO CARACCIOLO, MARLENE KARLSSON MARCUSSEN, AND DAVID RODRIGUEZ PART I Objects and the Resources of Description 17 1 Containment and Empathy in Katherine Mansfeld’s and Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories 19 LAURA OULANNE 2 Floating Air—Solid Furniture: Vibrant Spaces in Virginia Woolf’s “Time Passes” 36 MARLENE KARLSSON MARCUSSEN 3 The Descriptive Turn in German Nature-Oriented Neue Sachlichkeit (1913–1933): An Essay on Nonhuman Literary Genres 52 MICHAEL KARLSSON PEDERSEN PART II Catastrophic Narrative Environments 69 4 Nonhuman Presence and Ontological Instability in Twenty-First-Century New York Fiction 71 LIEVEN AMEEL vi Contents 5 Seasonal Feelings: Reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl During Winter Depression 89 KAISA KORTEKALLIO 6 Imagining Posthuman Environments in the Anthropocene: The Function of Space in Post- Apocalyptic Climate Change Fiction 104 CAROLIN GEBAUER 7 “It Wants to Become Real and Can Only Become Prose”: Anthropocenic Focalization in 10:04 and The World Without Us 125 DAVID RODRIGUEZ PART III Scales and Limits of Narrative 149 8 Maarit Verronen’s Monomaniacs of the Anthropocene: Scaling the Nonhuman in Contemporary Finnish Fiction 151 SARIANNA KANKKUNEN 9 Plotting the Nonhuman: The Geometry of Desire in Contemporary “Lab Lit” 166 MARCO CARACCIOLO 10 Lithic Space-Time in Lyric: Narrating the Poetic Anthropocene 182 BRIAN J. MCALLISTER 11 Narrating the “Great Outdoors” 201 RIDVAN ASKIN 12 Inside the Great Outdoors: A Complete and Unabridged Guide: With Travelogue, Bestiary, Judgement 221 LINE HENRIKSEN Index 227 Contributors Lieven Ameel is senior lecturer in comparative literature at Tampere University, Finland. He holds a PhD in Finnish literature and comparative literature from the University of Helsinki and the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. He has published widely on literary experiences of the city, narrative planning, and urban futures. His books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014), The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning (2020), and the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (2015), Literary Second Cities (2017), The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (2019), and Literatures of Urban Possibility (2021). Ridvan Askin is a postdoctoral teaching and research fellow in North American and General Literature at the University of Basel. He is the author of Narrative and Becoming (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), which elaborates a transcendental empiricist concept of narrative arguing for an understanding of narrative as fundamentally nonhuman instead of human, unconscious instead of correlated to consciousness, and expressive instead of representational. He is also the co-editor of several essay collections, including most recently New Directions in Philosophy and Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and The Aesthetics, Poetics, and Rhetoric of Soccer (Routledge, 2018). Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh.” Marco’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fction and other narrative media. He is the author of fve books, including most recently Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene (University of Virginia Press, 2021). Carolin Gebauer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. She is part of the Horizon 2020 project OPPORTUNITIES, which explores narratives on migration in the public sphere. She is currently working viii Contributors on a book on the cultural history of the representation of mobility in verbal and audiovisual narrative. Carolin is the author of the monograph Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (De Gruyter, 2021) and a member of the executive team of DIEGESIS, a bilingual interdisciplinary e-journal dedicated to narrative research. Line Henriksen is a postdoctoral researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, and affliated with the Technologies in Practice research group. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from Linkping University, and an MA in Modern

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