STRAY WRITING: NAVIGATING THE GREAT DERANGEMENT
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21153/cinder2018art760Keywords:
Anthropocene, creative writing, The Great Derangement, gradualism, Amitav Ghosh, strayAbstract
Many theorists have lamented the lack of serious literary fiction addressing the shifting realities of climate change, or ecological collapse. While the reasons for this lack are diverse, most hinge on the temporal dimensions of the Anthropocene. This paper—via a study of work emerging in the environmental humanities—is an attempt to fragment the totalising rhetoric of geological shift by illustrating that the Anthropocene affects humans and non-humans on narrative timescales that are neither apocalyptic nor gradual. In conclusion, drawing upon Barbara Creed’s formulation of the stray (2017), I advocate for the stray novel and provide a series of provocations for further research.
References
Barry, K 2015, Beatlebone, Canongate Books, Edinburgh
Bonneuil, C, Baptiste, F 2017, The Shock of the Anthropocene, trans. Fernbach D, Verso, New York
Bradley, J 2015, ‘Strange Weather: Writing in the Anthropocene’ in The Best Australian Essays, Black Ink, Collingwood, Melbourne
Creed, B 2017, Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene: Power Polemics, Power Publications, Sydney
Davis, H, Turpin, E 2015, ‘Art and Death: Lives between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction’, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies’, Open Humanities Press: 3-31
DeLillo, D 1984 (2011), White Noise, Picador, London
Dropkin, E 2016, ‘We Need Stories of Dystopia Without Apocalypse’, Electric Literature: https://electricliterature.com/we-need-stories-of-dystopia-without-apocalypse-73b3c15b5ee (accessed 11 Novemeber, 2017)
Falconer, D 1997, In the Service of Clouds, Pan Macmillan, Sydney
Ghosh, A 2016, The Great Derangement, University of Chicago Press, United States of America
Hamilton, C 2017, Defiant Earth: the fate of humans in the Anthropocene, Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2017
Haraway, D 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, Duke University Press, London
Hochschild, AR 2016, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, The New Press, New York
Moore, KD 2016, Great Tide Rising, Counterpoint Press, Berkley
Morton, T 2013, Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis
Probyn, E 2016, Eating the Ocean, Duke University Press, Durham
Ravenscroft, A 2013, ‘After the apocalypse: despair, hope, and all things between’, The Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/after-the-apocalypse-despair-hope-and-all-things-between-20131002-2utda.html (accessed 28 August 2017)
SBS 2018, “This place is a danger zone: Torres Straight residents evacuate as tides breach new $24m seawall”, SBS online: https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2018/01/31/place-danger-zone-torres-strait-residents-evacuate-tides-breach-new-24m-seawall (accesed 22 February 2018),
Trexler, A 2015, Anthropocene fictions: the novel in a time of climate change, University of Virginia Press, London
Tsing, AL 2015, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins, Princeton University Press, Princeton
Wark, M 2017, ‘On the Obsolesce of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, Verso: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene (accessed 25 August 2017)
Bauman, WA 2015, 'Climate Weirding and Queering Nature: Getting Beyond the Anthropocene', Religions, vol. 6, no. 2: 742-754. doi: 10.3390/rel6020742 (accessed 22 February 2018)
Wright, A 2013, ‘Deep Weather’ in Meanjin, 2: 70-83
Wright, A 2013, The Swan Book, Artarmon, Giramondo, NSW
