C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings 

About: C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is an academic journal published by Open Library of Humanities. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Anthropocene & Poetry. It has an ISSN identifier of 2045-5224. Over the lifetime, 84 publications have been published receiving 257 citations.

Geomediations in the Anthropocene: Fictions of the Geologic Turn

Abstract: In both literature and philosophy, geologic matter has been imagined as a vector of extending perception and analysis into the territory of not only the nonhuman, but also the non-living, challenging the very distinctions between life and non-life, agile and inert matter. Recently, the debates over the concept of the Anthropocene amplified our fascination with the geologic, bringing into view the inescapable bond of human and Earth’s history. The article probes the possibilities of the geologic turn through two short stories published in the era of the Anthropocene debates—Margaret Atwood’s ‘Stone Mattress’ (2013) and A.S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003). The stories’ interest in a geologic setting, their staging of human-mineral intimacies, and their geologically-infused aesthetics position these two stories as fictions of the geologic turn. I examine how these writers—through reconfiguring the relations between bios and geos, human and nonhuman—forge alternatives to an extractive relation to the geos, as well as refuse to accept the figure of Earth as either an inert object or a victim. In this reframing, they also exemplify feminist critique of the imagined unity of ‘Anthropos’ that is named by the Anthropocene thinkers.

Radical Homemaking in Contemporary American Environmental Fiction

Abstract: Ursula K Heise in ‘Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies’ critiques ‘the portrayal of multicultural and sometimes transnational nuclear families as the narrative solution to environmental and political problems’ (Heise, 2008: 383) This essay places Heise’s critique of the ‘ecological family romance’ in conversation with three other ecological domestic fictions: T C Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) Heise’s critique and Shannon Hayes’ Radical Homemakers (2010) frame my close readings of the novels’ interconnected themes of radical homemaking, transnationalism, and environmentalism My reading of the novels highlights their shared use of marginalized, racially-other characters to develop their entwined romantic and environmental plots (Lalitha in Freedom, several minor characters in A Friend of the Earth, and Ovid in Flight Behavior) and their use of sentimental deaths, especially of key female characters (Lalitha in Freedom, Sierra in A Friend of the Earth, and Dellarobia’s uncertain fate in Flight Behavior) By adopting the sentimental, domestic romance plot for ecological aims, the three novels highlight how environmental aims get stymied when cultural and ecological diversity are relegated to the margins They also suggest that more is gained than lost through their use of ecological allegory While the fictions do not offer solutions, they do push their readers to confront the Anthropocene’s ecological realities and their radical domestic-environmental politics

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and the Return of History

Abstract: William Gibson's Pattern Recognition contains extensive descriptions of consumer objects that reference the horrors of the past while eliding their reality. This extensive motif in the novel seems an echo of Francis Fukuyama's argument that the end of the Cold War had seen the triumph of political democracy combined with consumer capitalism in an end-point for history itself. Such illusions were profoundly destabilised by the 9/11 terror attacks, a central event in Gibson's novel, and Pattern Recognition is one of several 9/11 novels that seek to understand that day's events through a concern with history. Here, Cayce's dual search for the mysterious footage and her missing father leads her to both an engagement with the realities of historical trauma and a fulfilment of her own desire to mourn.

The Horror of the Anthropocene

Abstract: In this essay I explore the profound and specific fastening of horror to the Anthropocene by considering both scientific and philosophical responses to our contemporary moment. I then take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as a case study of the Anthropocene horror story, analysed in relation to the four stages of horror as defined by John Clute. This close reading of the The Road reveals a problem with the horror of the Anthropocene: just like the road down which the man and boy travel, it takes us nowhere. I end with a critical engagement with Donna Haraway’s coinage of an alternative descriptor – the Chthulucene – arguing that it remains haunted by horror. I conclude that the challenge remains to think the affect of the horror of the Anthropocene whilst conceiving of stories that will move us beyond it.