The Anthropocene Unconscious
Climate Catastrophe Culture
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture
The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'.
Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film critic and theorist Bould (Solaris) presents a wide-ranging if bumbling survey of the ways climate change is "unconsciously" addressed in culture. He uses as his foil Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, which, he writes, maintains that much of contemporary art and literature has failed to confront catastrophic climate change. Though he shares Ghosh's belief that literary fiction has faltered in this area, Bould argues that he doesn't agree these shortcomings are "near-universal," and instead suggests that, on the contrary, many contemporary works indirectly wrestle with the reality of global warming. "Is there no room for the symbolic?" he asks. Among the many texts he references are the Sharknado movie series, zombie films such as 28 Days Later, and such prescient sci-fi novels as J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, which, in 1962, imagined that rising temperatures would lead to rising tides. Still, not all of his examples are convincing; the closing section on the Fast and the Furious franchise, for example, falls short of effectively linking plots most notable for stunt driving to anything deeper. But Bould doesn't seem too concerned about making claims that seem "tenuous": "That's the dice you roll when you hazard criticism: you make judgments for which you can only offer support, never proof." Unfortunately, this misses the mark.
