Tuesday, February 17, 2015

 

''ANTHROPOCENE FICTIONS'' by ADAM TREXLER

Adam Trexler's ''ANTHROPOCENE FICTIONS: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change'' will be the academic book to watch in 2015, with pub date set for May.


''Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change'' is a non-fiction extended academic essay book covering 150 climate-themed novels past and present by independent scholar Adam Trexler in Oregon.

 

http://books.upress.virginia.edu/title/4777
 


Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the ''Anthropocene Age''. ''
 
The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but literary criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Enter the rising new genre of ''cli fi''.
 
Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first academic and systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.

Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change.
 
The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability.
 
In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.

 


Saturday, February 14, 2015

 

Laura van den Berg's 'Find Me' captures the 'apocalypse' in 'cli fi' debut

 

 
 
 
Ninety-five years ago T.S. Eliot published "The Wasteland," one of the first and bleakest visions of a shattered modern world. Nearly a century later, we're awash in fictional dystopias.

Science fiction writers tilled this stony ground for decades before the current vogue for grim variants of the Way We Live Now made bestsellers out of "The Road" and "Station Eleven" and created a vast marketing category for publishers of YA books such as "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent."


But if the dystopia bubble bursts, as the horror market did in the early 1990s, we may see an entirely new wasteland emerge. ''Cli-fi'' anyone? What cli-fi dystopic novels might survive a literary apocalypse?

Laura van den Berg's cli fi novel "Find Me" has a good shot.

Van den Berg uses her gift for capturing the disturbingly elegiac qualities of 21st century life to heartbreaking effect in this, her first cli fi novel.

Set in a near-future AMERICA blighted by disastrous climate change and ....



In an interview last year, Van den Berg spoke of her desire to capture the apocalyptic mood of contemporary life in a novel.

"I really wanted to take that weather, that atmosphere, and ask: what might be the tipping point?"


Find Me
Laura van den Berg
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

 

Adam Trexler's ''ANTHROPOCENE FICTIONS'' will be the academic book to watch in 2015 and beyond!

''Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change'' - a nonfiction book covering 150 climate-themed novels past and present by independent scholar Adam Trexler in Oregon and set for a  May 2015 release to a waiting world.

http://books.upress.virginia.edu/title/4777
 

Anthropocene Fictions:

The Novel in a Time of Climate Change

by Adam Trexler

 
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change.
Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action.
 
Reviews
"As an extremely timely contribution to the urgent discussions of climate change and culture in the Anthropocene, Anthropocene Fictions deserves high praise for carefully documenting the longer history of climate change novels as well as projecting forward into the uncertain futures of postapocalyptic writings. Trexler’s provocative theory of 'eco-nomics,' or the inextricably intertwined aspects of ecological and economic choices made in our industrial cultures as we navigate rising waters and rising costs in the twenty-first century, is one with wide relevance for anyone interested in the cultural impact of global environmental change."
—Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University, author of The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
"With admirable thoroughness Adam Trexler has traced over 150 novels that are about climate change in one sense or another. He highlights the profound cultural shifts that are accompanying this phenomenon and underlines the novelty of the artistic challenges it represents for novelists. This result is an original and thoughtful book that must become an important reference point for future work in environmental criticism and in studies of the novel."
—Timothy Clark, Durham University
 
About the author
Adam Trexler is an independent scholar living in Portland, Oregon


 

"Clade" is an important hybrid novel -- sci fi and cli fi combined -- and deserves a wide global readership

CLADE  is an important hybrid novel -- sci fi and cli fi combined, maybe fantasy genre as well -- and deserves a wide global readership. Australian genre critic and novelist James Bradley excels at this and has turned in a bravura performance from first page to the last. Published and distributed mostly in the author's home country of Lifeboat Australia, "Clade" deserves to transcend publishing borders and find a home in North America and Europe, South Africa and all other English speaking countries. I wouldn't be surprised if this novel finds a home as well in several foreign language translations, and might even end up being produced by an Australian director like David Michod or someone. Books like this matter, whatever genre they fall in. Again, story is all.

SO:

 "Clade" is an important hybrid novel -- sci fi and cli fi combined -- and deserves a wide global readership..

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?