El. knyga: Narrative in the Anthropocene

"Drawing from a wide set of narratives-novels, collective biographies, indigenous speculative fiction and Afro-futurist fiction, short stories, and graphic novels-James argues that the Anthropocene is changing the very nature of narrative today"--

The author explores the act of telling and hearing stories in the current era marked by the human impact on the Earth's geology and ecosystems, showing how narrative and the Anthropocene inform and are influenced by each other, particularly how narrative aids in the understanding of the current state of the world and people’s relationship to it, as well as how narrative and how it functions is better understood by placing it within the context of the Anthropocene. He examines narrative examples of key ideas that environmental humanities scholars associate with the era, including the influence of humans on the physical world, the recognition of nonhuman material agency, the evolutionary timescales demanded by an understanding of the Anthropocene, the increasing instability of space, ideas of collective human action, and climate change, in novels, biographies, indigenous fiction and Afro-futurist speculative fiction, short stories, and graphic novels like Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Maria Popova's Figuring, Richard McGuire's Here, Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves, Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts, Marina Vitaglione's Solastalgia, Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible, and others. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Argues that a richer understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in the Anthropocene provides us with invaluable insight into how stories shape our world.

In Narrative in the Anthropocene, Erin James poses two complementary questions: What can narrative teach us about our current geological epoch, defined and marked by the irrevocable activity of humans on the Earth’s geology and ecosystems? and What can our current geological epoch teach us about narrative? Drawing from a wide range of sources—including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Maria Popova’s collective biography Figuring, Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, Indigenous and Afrofuturist speculative fiction, and more—James argues that a richer understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in the Anthropocene provides us with invaluable insight into how stories shape our world. At the same time, she contends that the Anthropocene alters the very nature of narrative. Throughout her exploration of these themes, James lays the groundwork for an “Anthropocene narrative theory,” introducing new modes of reading narrative in the Anthropocene; new categories of narrative time, space, narration, and narrativity; and a new definition of narrative itself as a cognitive and rhetorical tool for purposeful worldbuilding.