BOOK COVER AND INTRO UVA PRESS
An eagle-eyed observer of the climate-themed literary scene in Britain spotted this new review of Anthropocene Fictions by Adam Trexler -- a nonfiction book of essays published by UVA Press two years ago! -- from the University of Virginia Press -- and while that book has not been reviewed very much at all, since academic journals take their time reviewing such academic tomes due to the long lead time needed to assign and edit such reviews in academic journals -- however, yes, better late than never ......and while the book came out long ago and this new review is good! The review itself is no longer behind any paywall, as reported earlier, and I have prepared some brief excerpts from the review which I downloaded after it came out in the July 2016 issue of the OLR, which is now online at
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2016.0184
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2016.0184
However, read on: this is perhaps the most important nonfiction study of 150 climate themed novels ever to be published yet on Planet Earth, as the Anthrocene bears down on us all. ENJOY!
Reviewed by Matthew Griffiths
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/author/matthew-griffiths/
https://www.alluvium-journal.org/author/matthew-griffiths/
Matthew Griffiths was born in Birmingham and worked in London as an editor for ten years before moving to Durham, where he got his PhD on the poetics of climate change.
His poems have appeared many magazines and his stories in ''Doctor Who: Short Trips'' anthologies. A science-fiction novel, ''The Weather on Versimmon,'' was published by Big Finish in 2012. Matthew Griffiths critical book ''The New Poetics of Climate Change'' is due out from Bloomsbury in 2017.
[Matthew Griffiths studied under Timothy Clark at Durham University and has got an academic book coming out on Modernist Poetics and climate change in 2017 through Bloomsbury, which promises to be great. Timothy Clark was most likely fairly instrumental in getting this Adam Trexler tome reviewed (since Dr Clark is editor of the current issue of the OLR) as in Dr Clark's last book he talks about Trexler's work fairly extensively.]
The Oxford Literary Review 38.1 (2016): 149–164
Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate
Change (Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press,
2015).
Just MOVE YOUR CURSOR ALONG the earlier blacked-out grafs to read them in plain sight.
Just MOVE YOUR CURSOR ALONG the earlier blacked-out grafs to read them in plain sight.
Because it will have to factor in countless human and nonhuman
agencies, the great climate change novel is unlikely to be written;
yet, on the strength of Adam Trexler’s cogent and ranging account
in Anthropocene Fictions, there are already a number of good climate
change novels.
This makes sense given Trexler’s critique of such novels
using the theory of Bruno Latour: fiction that is receptive to the agency
of climate is also likely to be receptive to other positions, all of them
participating in networks of cultural understanding.
We should be wary, therefore, of settling for a handful of texts
to tell the tale of climate change. Yet it is also apparent from
Trexler’s book that a canon of Anthropocene fiction— or in DanBloom’s coinage “cli-fi” — is already solidifying, comprising texts such
as Ian McKewan’s Solar, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Paolo
Bacigalupi’s The Wind-up Girl and Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Science in
the Capital’ trilogy.
Since these serve for Trexler as indicative examples
from what is clearly a comprehensive survey, and each of them is
discussed at various points in his book, the dearth of strong examples
on which he can draw is unfortunately emphasised. Nevertheless, his
analysis is among the strongest of these texts I have read: rather than
simply treating them topically, he makes clear the work that they are
doing in a Latourian sense.
For instance, Trexler describes the melange
of technologies put to service in ''The Wind-Up Girl'' as follows:
Far from superannuating the past, the factory combines medieval
animal power, Victorian presses and labor conditions, early 20th - century
assembly lines, late-20th - century computing,
and futuristic biotechnology into a single system, all to replicate the
density of energy taken for granted in the late twentieth century.
Although Trexler does not make the link explicit, this recalls Latour’s
illustration of ‘multiple times’ in We Have Never Been Modern: ‘I may
use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five
years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. [. . . ] show me an activity
that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time’.
Just as we should avoid fixating on the idea of “the” climate
change novel, we should likewise be cautious of imagining that the
novel is the best mode for engaging with it. Trexler’s occasional
asides — for example, documentaries, nonfiction and films are said
to ‘lack the novel’s capacity to interrogate the emotional, aesthetic,
and living experience of the Anthropocene’ — can sound unhelpful
when a multitude of approaches might clearly be adopted. Although
Trexler expresses concern that by ‘Following a cross-genre approach,
global warming could become still more dematerialized’ , a critical
work such as this enables a nuanced understanding of what cultural
construction of climate change might mean and, likewise, of how it
cannot be used to gainsay the material effects of a warming world.
For
instance, Trexler capably tackles Michael Crichton’s State of Fear — of
which ‘over 1.5 million copies were printed in the United States alone’
(35) and which was invoked by Republican senator James M. Inhofe
in rebutting the idea of global warming — by arguing that the novel
undermines itself in using fiction to assert the absolute truth of science
because it thus cannot account for its own, fictional affirmation of that
position.
Trexler might then be seen to practise in critical terms the
judo politics that Ulrich Beck describes ‘whose goal is to mobilize the
superior strength of environmental miscreants against themselves’.
The other strength of Trexler’s survey is in its explication of
what climate change does to literary form. The book details the
gradual distortions and complications that occur to generic structures
until they are better able to explore the Anthropocene’s complexities
and implications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in the period of the
Anthropocene’s recognition as such, or as a possibility, that the fiction
emerges which Trexler finds most suited to the task.
The novels he
ultimately endorses broadly fall in the mode of realism, although this
conclusion is surprising given that Trexler premises his book on the
idea that the concerns of canonical literature — character, society and
so on — are in themselves ill-equipped to engage with the exigencies
of a changing climate. The (relative) success of realism stems from the
fact that earlier cli-fi novelists had attempted to reject climate change
tout court, directing all their resources against it as a narrative event
because none of these could bring its scale, agency and unintended
emergence within the frame of fiction.
Latour observes in Politics
of Nature that environmentalists had ‘come up with nothing better
than a nature already composed, already totalized, already instituted
to neutralize politics’,5- and there seems to have been a similar fear
among the earlier novelists cited by Trexler that climate change would
neutralise the operation of fiction as well. As a result of this threat,
initial, more sensational examples of cli-fi homogenised the societies
they represented to unify them in “overcoming” the “problem” of
global warming, but thereby ended up championing a species of
heroic, Western individualism. Understandably, this did not lead to
particularly good novels; so, the emergence of more successful ones
suggests merely that literary novels about climate change are written
by writing literary novels about climate change.
The broadly canonical
remit of such novels, however, still cannot allow for a correspondingly
full recognition of relations among nonhuman agents and their effects
on humans, and Trexler might usefully have drawn on work in new
materialism to give a stronger account of this aspect of his study.
Trexler’s other difficulty in Anthropocene Fictions is conceptual
rather than analytical, in the shape of the more-problematic-than-itseems
equivalence he proposes between the Anthropocene and climate
change.
Neither is reducible to the other— if anything, anthropogenic
climate change is merely one symptom of the Anthropocene— so
while Trexler is wise to seek a term that will ‘shift the emphasis
from individual thoughts, beliefs, and choices to a human process
that has occurred across distinct social groups, countries, economies,
and generations’, it is difficult to argue that this approach does
more than swapping one contention for another.
The title seems more
likely to have been chosen because the Anthropocene’s critical stock
is currently high; even if the term is not formally adopted, it still
reflects broader cultural concerns relating to anthropogenic climate
change.
Another unanticipated quality of the phrase ‘Anthropocene fictions’
is its potentially tautological quality: all fictions could be considered
‘Anthropocenic’ in that both literary practice and the putative
geological era are the result of complex networks of intentional
and unintentional forces that, while directed in particular way, are
irreducible to those directions.
If the Anthropocene is ratified as a
geological epoch, then we should see more exploratory investigations
of this correspondence— whether novelists intend them or not.
NOTE: At the time of writing, the question of whether we have entered the Anthropocene,
and when it might have begun, is still in the process of being determined by the
Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy,
under the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
===============
FULL TEXT
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2016.0184
FULL TEXT
http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/olr.2016.0184
Because it will have to factor in countless human and nonhuman agencies, the great climate change novel is unlikely to be written; yet, on the strength of Adam Trexler's cogent and ranging account in Anthropocene Fictions, there are already a number of good climate change novels. This makes sense given Trexler's critique of such novels using the theory of Bruno Latour: fiction that is receptive to the agency of climate is also likely to be receptive to other positions, all of them participating in networks of cultural understanding.
We should be wary, therefore, of settling for a handful of texts to tell the tale of climate change. Yet it is also apparent from Trexler's book that a canon of Anthropocene fiction — or in Dan Bloom's coinage “cli-fi” — is already solidifying, comprising texts such as Ian McKewan's Solar, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Wind-up Girl and Kim Stanley Robinson's ‘Science in the Capital’ trilogy. Since these serve for Trexler as indicative examples from what is clearly a comprehensive survey,1 and each of them is discussed at various points in his book, the dearth of strong examples on which he can draw is unfortunately emphasised. Nevertheless, his analysis is among the strongest of these texts I have read: rather than simply treating them topically, he makes clear the work that they are doing in a Latourian sense. For instance, Trexler describes the melange of technologies put to service in The Wind-Up Girl as follows:
Far from superannuating the past, the factory combines medieval animal power, Victorian presses and labor conditions, early-twentieth-century assembly lines, late-twentieth-century computing, and futuristic biotechnology into a single system, all to replicate the density of energy taken for granted in the late twentieth century. (217)
Although Trexler does not make the link explicit, this recalls Latour's illustration of ‘multiple times’ in We Have Never Been Modern: ‘I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. […] show me an activity that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time’.2
Just as we should avoid fixating on the idea of “the” climate change novel, we should likewise be cautious of imagining that the novel is the best mode for engaging with it. Trexler's occasional asides — for example, documentaries, nonfiction and films are said to ‘lack the novel's capacity to interrogate the emotional, aesthetic, and living experience of the Anthropocene’ (6) — can sound unhelpful when a multitude of approaches might clearly be adopted. Although Trexler expresses concern that by ‘Following a cross-genre approach, global warming could become still more dematerialized’ (6), a critical work such as this enables a nuanced understanding of what cultural construction of climate change might mean and, likewise, of how it cannot be used to gainsay the material effects of a warming world. For instance, Trexler capably tackles Michael Crichton's State of Fear — of which ‘over 1.5 million copies were printed in the United States alone’ (35) and which was invoked by Republican senator James M. Inhofe in rebutting the idea of global warming — by arguing that the novel undermines itself in using fiction to assert the absolute truth of science because it thus cannot account for its own, fictional affirmation of that position. Trexler might then be seen to practise in critical terms the judo politics that Ulrich Beck describes ‘whose goal is to mobilize the superior strength of environmental miscreants against themselves’.3
The other strength of Trexler's survey is in its explication of what climate change does to literary form. The book details the gradual distortions and complications that occur to generic structures until they are better able to explore the Anthropocene's complexities and implications. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in the period of the Anthropocene's recognition as such, or as a possibility,4 that the fiction emerges which Trexler finds most suited to the task. The novels he ultimately endorses broadly fall in the mode of realism, although this conclusion is surprising given that Trexler premises his book on the idea that the concerns of canonical literature — character, society and so on — are in themselves ill equipped to engage with the exigencies of a changing climate. The (relative) success of realism stems from the fact that earlier cli-fi novelists had attempted to reject climate change tout court, directing all their resources against it as a narrative event because none of these could bring its scale, agency and unintended emergence within the frame of fiction. Latour observes in Politics of Nature that environmentalists had ‘come up with nothing better than a nature already composed, already totalized, already instituted to neutralize politics’,5 and there seems to have been a similar fear among the earlier novelists cited by Trexler that climate change would neutralise the operation of fiction as well. As a result of this threat, initial, more sensational examples of cli-fi homogenised the societies they represented to unify them in “overcoming” the “problem” of global warming, but thereby ended up championing a species of heroic, Western individualism. Understandably, this did not lead to particularly good novels; so, the emergence of more successful ones suggests merely that literary novels about climate change are written by writing literary novels about climate change. The broadly canonical remit of such novels, however, still cannot allow for a correspondingly full recognition of relations among nonhuman agents and their effects on humans, and Trexler might usefully have drawn on work in new materialism to give a stronger account of this aspect of his study.
Trexler's other difficulty in Anthropocene Fictions is conceptual rather than analytical, in the shape of the more-problematic-than-it-seems equivalence he proposes between the Anthropocene and climate change. Neither is reducible to the other — if anything, anthropogenic climate change is merely one symptom of the Anthropocene — so while Trexler is wise to seek a term that will ‘shift the emphasis from individual thoughts, beliefs, and choices to a human process that has occurred across distinct social groups, countries, economies, and generations’ (4), it is difficult to argue that this approach does more than swapping one contention for another. The title seems more likely to have been chosen because the Anthropocene's critical stock is currently high; even if the term is not formally adopted, it still reflects broader cultural concerns relating to anthropogenic climate change.
Another unanticipated quality of the phrase ‘Anthropocene fictions’ is its potentially tautological quality: all fictions could be considered ‘Anthropocenic’ in that both literary practice and the putative geological era are the result of complex networks of intentional and unintentional forces that, while directed in particular way, are irreducible to those directions. If the Anthropocene is ratified as a geological epoch, then we should see more exploratory investigations of this correspondence — whether novelists intend them or not.
Notes
1 Trexler's study was partly resourced by the European Social Fund and conducted with Adeline Johns-Putra at the University of Exeter, as he acknowledges.
2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf–Simon & Schuster, 1993), 75.
3 Ulrich, Beck, World at Risk, translated by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 99.
4 At the time of writing, the question of whether we have entered the Anthropocene, and when it might have begun, is still in the process of being determined by the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, under the International Commission on Stratigraphy.
5 Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
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