Arcadian Revenge

Posted on Feb 12, 2020 in Publications, Research | 0 comments

I’m currently working on my new book project, Arcadian Revenge: Science Fiction in the Era of Ecocatastrophe, which considers “ecocatastrophe” narratives in literature, film, graphic fiction, contemporary art and music. Drawing on debates in eco-socialism and anti-humanism, as well as contemporary philosophies of environmental posthumanism and the new (feminist) materialisms, the book poses a provocative wager: how do these visions, in which humanity’s survival is threatened, or even obliterated, privilege utopian hope for the planet?

The book develops a unique method for reading these stories of environmental crisis as offering a utopian aesthetic dimension, composed of innovative formal, narratological, and stylistic elements. The book’s wager is that SF narratives of environmental disaster not only reveal the urgency of rethinking anthropocentric frameworks of human habitation and belonging, but also that such narratives, perhaps surprisingly, insist upon the utopian imagination of better possible communities amid the wreckage of societal collapse.

Drawing on recent scholarship that explores the ecological dimensions of many SF narratives written and published since the late nineteenth century, as well as work on contemporary post-apocalyptic literature and culture, Arcadian Revenge develops a reading of SF ecocatastrophe narratives that understands the utopian formal properties of these texts to offer a politicised aesthetic mode, rather than simply another SF sub-genre. The book will draw together works in literature, film, graphic fiction, creative non-fiction, contemporary art, and music to assemble a compelling caucus of visions in which humanity’s survival is threatened, or even obliterated, in ways that privilege utopian hope for the planet.

To this end, Arcadian Revenge outlines a method of “utopian posthumanism” in developing a suitable hermeneutic for reading these narratives. This brings contemporary ideas about utopia-as-process into philosophical dialogue with the feminist posthumanities. As the formal close readings in the book demonstrate, an ecologically nuanced interpretive method helps us uncover a post-anthropocentric structure of feeling and its utopian aesthetic dimension in a number of important cultural works of the contemporary period.

I’ll add more information soon, as this project develops.

Featured image by chiaralily shared under a CC BY-NC license