In recent years, critics and novelists alike have questioned literature’s potential to represent, register, and challenge environmental disaster. Perhaps the most-discussed interventions into this debate are Amitav Ghosh’s lectures on literature and climate change, published as The Great Derangement in 2016, in which Ghosh posits that contemporary novels are failing to come to terms with the “unthinkable” phenomena of climate change, the Anthropocene, and extinction. In this essay, I wish to deepen and complicate Ghosh’s arguments by turning to another Indian writer, Mahasweta Devi (1926– 2016), whose works not only represent the increasing anthropogenic extinctions of human and nonhuman life, but who in doing so calls into question the very archival drives of literature which Ghosh’s lectures implicitly privilege. In her short novel Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha (1989; hereafter Pterodactyl), originally written in Bengali but translated into the Anglophone postcolonial canon via Gayatri Spivak’s 1995 publication of Imaginary Maps, Mahasweta narrates a story in which a dispassionate journalist, Puran Sahay, travels to a famine-stricken tribal village in central India. There, he encounters two kinds of vulnerability which confound his narrow idea of life: an impoverished adivasi (literally, original inhabitant) community who faces continual dispossession by national development projects, and a prehistoric pterodactyl, suffering from a broken wing. Pterodactyl stages Puran’s encounter with the incommensurable figure of the pterodactyl, an encounter which reveals how his humanitarianism is complicit with the slow anthropogenic violence of adivasi genocide and nonhuman ecocide. Pterodactyl thus opens out onto a plurality of human and nonhuman temporalities which trouble Puran’s narrow anthropocentrism. What often goes unexplored in the criticism on Pterodactyl is how its plot hinges on a creative engagement with extinction, what I will call here literary de-extinction. If de-extinction names a bio-technical regeneration of previously extinct species – think of charismatic megafauna such as woolly mammoths and thylacines, brought back from the dead via frozen DNA samples – then I introduce the term literary de-extinction in order to outline

中文翻译：

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“进入生活：”文学灭绝和玛哈威塔·德维的翼手龙，普兰·萨海和皮尔塔的生活档案

近年来，评论家和小说家都质疑文学代表，记录和挑战环境灾难的潜力。这场辩论中讨论最多的干预措施可能是阿米塔夫·戈什（Amitav Ghosh）关于文学与气候变化的演讲，该演讲于2016年发表在《大怪谈》中，其中戈什断言当代小说未能与气候变化的“不可思议”现象融为一体，人类世，并灭绝。在本文中，我希望通过寻求另一位印度作家玛哈斯韦塔·德维（Mahasweta Devi，1926-2016年）来加深和复杂化戈什的论点，他的作品不仅代表着人类和非人类生活的日益灭绝的人类灭绝，而且还引起了人们的质疑。戈什（Ghosh）的演讲暗含了文学的档案驱动力。在她的短篇小说翼手龙中，Puran Sahay和Pirtha（1989；以下称翼龙）最初用孟加拉语写成，但通过Gayatri Spivak在1995年出版的Imaginary Maps翻译成英语后殖民典范。在印度中部受灾的部落村庄。在那里，他遇到了两种脆弱性，这使他狭narrow的生活观念变得混乱：一个贫穷的阿瓦帕西人（从字面上看，是原住民）社区，面对着国家发展项目的不断剥夺，一个史前翼手龙遭受了折断的翅膀。翼龙（Pterodactyl）使普兰（Puran）与无与伦比的翼龙（Pterodactyl）人物相遇，这一次相遇揭示了他的人道主义与阿瓦帕西种族灭绝和非人类灭绝种族的缓慢人为暴力是同谋的。因此，翼手龙向多个人类和非人类的世界开放，这困扰着普兰的狭an的人类中心主义。在对翼龙的批评中，经常未被探索的是它的情节是如何与灭绝的创造性互动联系在一起的，我在这里将其称为文学灭绝。如果说灭绝是先前灭绝物种的生物技术再生，例如具有超凡魅力的大型动物，例如猛ma象和胸腺嘧啶，它们是通过冷冻的DNA样本从死里带回来的，那么我将引入文学灭绝一词来概述 我在这里称之为文学消灭。如果说灭绝是先前灭绝物种的生物技术再生，例如具有超凡魅力的大型动物，例如猛ma象和胸腺嘧啶，它们是通过冷冻的DNA样本从死里带回来的，那么我将引入文学灭绝一词来概述 我在这里称之为文学消灭。如果说灭绝是先前灭绝物种的生物技术再生，例如具有超凡魅力的大型动物，例如猛ma象和胸腺嘧啶，它们是通过冷冻的DNA样本从死里带回来的，那么我将引入文学灭绝一词来概述