Contemporary Collapse: New Narratives of the End : An Introduction

• This special issue takes seriously the idea that “global climate change is [...] catastrophic for the human imaginary” (Colebrook 10) and focuses on contemporary narratives that nevertheless seek to imagine the end of the world. It includes articles that explore how these narratives question the significance of the human in a collapsingworld, how this resonates with current issues in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities and allows for an articulation of environmental scholarship with the contributions of collapse and apocalypse studies. The contributions to this special issue investigate a posthuman aesthetics in contemporary literature, which builds on,but mostly shifts Western and anthropocentric conceptions of collapse,and diverges from the apocalyptic tradition. In that sense, this special topic considers the posthumusalong with the posthuman, to think about what happens after death, where the posthumusrenegotiates the assemblage of chains of life between animals, plants and humans (Derrida 285). The issue also includes essays that engage with ethical concerns of apocalyptic narratives, as well as with their epistemological implications, where the presence or absence of human and nonhuman traces determines a specific knowledge and way of knowing in a collapsing world.Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Open Humanities Press, 2014.Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, Chicago University Press, 2010.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora -- Kulturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities -- Cultural Studies (hsv//eng)

Keyword

collapse

narratives

dystopia

aesthetic

nonhuman perspectives

romanska språk med inriktning mot franska

Romance Languages, Specialisation in French

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)