A significant strand of contemporary fiction engages with scientific models that highlight a constitutive interdependency between humanity and material realities such as the climate or the geological history of our planet. This article looks at the ways in which narrative may capture this human-nonhuman interrelation, which occupies the foreground of debates on the so-called Anthropocene. I argue that the formal dimension of scientific knowledge-as manifested by diagrams or metaphors used by scientists-is central to this narrative remediation. I explore two analogical strategies through which narrative may pursue a formal dialogue with science: clusters of metaphorical language and the global structuring of the plot. Rivka Galchen's novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008), for instance, builds on a visual representation of meteorological patterns in a storm (lifted from an actual scientific paper) to stage the narrator's mental illness. Two other contemporary works (Orfeo by Richard Powers and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki) integrate scientific models through the overall design of the plot. By offering close readings of these novels, I seek to expand work in the area of New Formalism and show how formal choices are crucial to bringing together the human-scale world and more-than-human phenomena.

中文翻译：

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人类世的形式、科学和叙事

当代小说的一个重要部分涉及科学模型，这些模型强调了人类与物质现实（例如我们星球的气候或地质历史）之间构成性的相互依存关系。本文着眼于叙事可以捕捉这种人类与非人类相互关系的方式，这种关系占据了所谓的人类世辩论的前景。我认为科学知识的形式维度——如科学家使用的图表或隐喻所表明的——是这种叙事补救的核心。我探索了两种类比策略，通过这些策略，叙事可以追求与科学的正式对话：隐喻语言的集群和情节的全局结构。例如，Rivka Galchen 的小说《大气扰动》（2008），建立在风暴中的气象模式的视觉表示上（从实际的科学论文中提取）来展示叙述者的精神疾病。另外两部当代作品（Richard Powers 的 Orfeo 和 Ruth Ozeki 的 A Tale for the Time Being）通过情节的整体设计整合了科学模型。通过仔细阅读这些小说，我试图扩大新形式主义领域的工作，并展示形式选择对于将人类尺度的世界和超人类现象结合起来是多么重要。