Surreal entanglements : essays on Jeff VanderMeer's fiction / edited by Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Economides, Louise, 1967- editor.

Shackelford, Laura, editor.

Series:

Routledge studies in world literatures and the environment

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

VanderMeer, Jeff--Criticism and interpretation.

VanderMeer, Jeff.

Ecology in literature.

Surrealism (Literature).

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xii, 268 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021.

Summary:

"This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer's fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer's work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer's work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, anthropology, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Weird Ecology: VanderMeer's Anthropocene Fiction / Louise Economides and Laura Shackelford

Node 1: More-than-Human Traces and Symbiotic Monsters: A Posthumanist Politics for the Anthropocene Era?

Home on the Strange: The Queering of Place in VanderMeer's Borne Books / Louise Economides

Acceptance and Continuation: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy and Hope in the Anthropocene / Arwen Spicer

Entangled Care and the Trouble with Making Family in Borne / Samuel Gormley

'Love Your Monsters:' Anthropocene Discourse and Green Psychoanalysis in Jeff VanderMeer's Borne and The Strange Bird: A Borne Story / Sydney Lane

Node 2: Materialist Speculation after Quantum Physics

Microbiology and Microcosms: Ecosystem and the Body in Shriek: An Afterword / Octavia Cade

Strange Matters: More-than-Human Entanglements and Topological Spacetimes / Laura Shackelford

Street Smarts for Smart Streets / Rob Coley

Tentacular Narrative Webs: Unthinking Humans in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy / Dunja M. Mohr

Node 3: Aesthetics of Perception and Genre Sense; or Politics Made Perceptible

Genre Tentacular: Area X and the Southern Neogothic / Lee Rozelle

'Another World, another life:' Humans, Monsters, and Politics in Predator: South China Sea / Benjamin J. Robertson

Can You Describe Its Form? Annihilationand Cinematic Adaptation / Cameron Kunzelman

Love in the Time of the Anthropocene: A Conversation Between Alison Sperling and Jeff VanderMeer / Alison Sperling.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Surreal entanglements

ISBN:

9780367360849

0367360845

OCLC:

1224512909