Showing papers by "Marco Caracciolo published in 2021"

Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene

Abstract: A hierarchical model of human societies’ relations with the natural world is at the root of today’s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton’s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena. How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes—from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution—can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters’ mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

Emplotment beyond the Human Scale: On Deep Time and Narrative Nonlinearity

Abstract: In the second volume of Time and Narrative (1985, 101–12), Paul Ricoeur distinguishes between two layers of temporality in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925): he calls them “monumental” time and “mortal” time. The former is connected with authority and British imperial politics; the latter is the subjective, highly malleable time of human experience. But there is another time, also active in Woolf's novel and in her oeuvre more generally, that Ricoeur seems to overlook. It is the “deep history” (Shryock and Smail 2011) of geological and planetary phenomena that vastly surpasses the time scale of individual humans or human societies, or even of the human species. This is not to say that narrative is at ease with this deep temporality; as a practice, it seems fundamentally skewed toward the ethical and hermeneutic concerns that Ricoeur foregrounds in his work. But deep time does surface in narrative; this article is concerned with the formal challenges raised by such surfacings.

Being Moved by Nature in the Anthropocene: On the Limits of the Ecological Sublime:

Abstract: According to recent accounts, we experience the emotion of “being moved” when a situation brings into play our core values. What are the core values evoked by nonhuman landscapes, however, particul...