Description
Book SynopsisThis 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 glo
Table of Contents
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
