Full Description
Liliane Campos argues that contemporary fiction is shaping a new, multi-scalar view of life. In the early twenty-first century, humans face complex relations of dependency with the invisibly small and the ungraspably huge, from the viral to the planetary. Entangled Life examines how Anglophone fiction imagines this ecological interdependence. It outlines an emergent poetics across a range of genres, including realist fiction, science-fiction, weird fiction and dystopian fiction. Arguing that literary form performs epistemic and ethical work, Campos analyses the rhetorical strategies through which these stories connect human and non-human scales. She shows that fiction uses three recurrent devices - critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis and scalar irony - to shape our awareness of other scales and forms of life, and our response-ability towards them. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Contents
List of figures; Acknowledgements; Introduction: on the poetics and ethics of scale; 1. Multi-scalar life in twenty-first-century theory and culture; 2. Living landscapes as microcosms: Leslie Marmon Silko's gardens in the dunes, Amitav Ghosh's the hungry tide and A. S. Byatt's 'a stone woman'; 3. Synecdoches of Anthropocene agency: Jeanette Winterson's the stone gods and Jeff VanderMeer's southern reach trilogy; 4. Trans-scalar encounters as allegory and metalepsis: Richard Powers's the overstory and Alexis Wright's the swan book; 5. The strange loops of symbiotic selves: Greg Bear's Darwin's radio and David Mitchell's the bone clocks; 6. Multi-scalar focalisation as irony: Margaret Atwood's 'torching the dusties', Ali Smith's Winter and T. C. Boyle's the terranauts; Conclusion. reading as rescaling; Bibliography; Index.
