Humbling the human: Posthuman explorations in contemporary short fiction (original) (raw)

Ecology and Epiphany in Short Fiction by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates

Ecocene: Cappadocia journal of environmental humanities, 2022

This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments in which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits and planetary damage. These moments build on a longer literary history of epiphany in modern fiction, a history that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, and the mundane, but these short stories also adapt epiphany to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Smith’s “The Lazy River” (2017), and Oates’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019), I show how these stories’ ecological epiphanies invite the reader to emotionally confront the urgency of the climate crisis and to take action. While important arguments by Amitav Ghosh and Rob Nixon argue that literature must make planetary crisis visible, Smith’s and Oates’s short stories suggest that some contemporary writers now face a different issue, not a need to heighten the visibility of the damage, but rather a need to psychologically confront its terrible obviousness.

Through Thick and Thin: The Romance of the Species in the Anthropocene

International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2018

The emerging field of animal studies has a curious relationship with environmentalism. Instead of fitting comfortably in the latter’s capacious tent, animal studies has chafed at environmentalists’ commitment to holistic communitarianism best represented by Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic.” The land ethic approaches the biotic community as a pyramidal ecological system that turns on the relations between producers and consumers and between predators and prey rather than as an egalitarian moral community. Animal rights activists have thus repeatedly clashed with conservationists in an internecine fight poignantly dramatized in T.C. Boyle’s novel When the Killing’s Done (2011). In this paper, I argue that environmental justice cannot be secured solely from the third-person perspective of the deontological argument underlying animal rights or the utilitarian argument often used to justify the land ethic. Instead, we might draw on the pragmatist traditions East and West and view justice as a larger loyalty achieved as much by the moral imagination of the particular from the first- and second-person perspectives as by rational deliberation on the universal. Using a French novel (The Roots of Heaven, 1958), a Chinese novel (The Disappearance of Lao Hai, 2001), and a Chinese film (Monster Hunt, 2015) as my examples, I demonstrate how literature’s thick narratives can engender an ethics of care by bringing particular instances of non-human distress into aesthetic, affective, and moral proximity with us.

Eco-Criticism and Nature Writing .the Trails of the American Approaches

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, 2014

Ecocritical attention has primarily focused on nineteenth– and twentieth-century British and American texts, predominantly non-fiction nature writing, and also nature-conscious fiction and poetry. The paper attempts to shed light to a series of puzzling but response-inciting questions regarding the American gendered approaches to nature, and the niche that Ecocriticism occupies in mainstream American Literature. The study is conceived as a merging of theoretical arguments and textual study. The theoretical part attempts to shed light on such issues as: Ecocritical traits and approaches; European vs. American approaches to nature; and Nature and Women's writing .The focus of the textual study are 10 American Nature Writing non-fiction classics and illustrated considerations of the main topics handled in these works. The study seeks to show that though ecocriticism is attempting to break new trails by going through the untrammeled nature-centered works, humans are failing to go wi...