Abstract:While most discussions of climate change fiction tend to focus on genres and objects, this essay foregrounds the importance of the notion of form. Starting from an understanding of the Anthropocene as marked by the entanglement of particular (social, cultural, symbolic) forms of life and (biological) life forms, the essay argues that literature’s “life of form” can productively engage the complexities of those interactions. Indeed, if philosophical discussions of Anthropocene life such as Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife and Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene suffer from a confusion of life forms and forms of life, a novel like Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is more canny about their multifarious interactions. Ultimately, and in contrast to most post-catastrophe fiction, Mandel’s novel is less interested in the specter of the end of the human species than in the fundamental contingency of all human forms of life. The essay draws on Eric Santner’s work in political theology and on Station Eleven’s intertextual usage of the work of William Shakespeare and Herman Melville to present an account of the multifarious interactions between life and form that are at stake in climate change fiction.

中文翻译：

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必死之美：第十一站、气候变化小说和形式的生命

摘要：虽然大多数关于气候变化小说的讨论倾向于集中在体裁和对象上，但本文突出了形式概念的重要性。从对以特定（社会、文化、象征）生命形式和（生物）生命形式纠缠为标志的人类世的理解开始，本文认为文学的“形式生命”可以有效地参与这些相互作用的复杂性。事实上，如果对人类世生活的哲学讨论，如塞缪尔·谢弗勒的死与来世和罗伊·斯克兰顿的《学会在人类世中死去》遭受生命形式和生命形式的混淆，那么像艾米丽·圣约翰·曼德尔这样的小说十一站更精明关于他们各种各样的互动。最终，与大多数灾后小说相比，曼德尔的小说对人类物种终结的幽灵不太感兴趣，而是对所有人类生命形式的基本偶然性感兴趣。这篇文章借鉴了埃里克·桑特纳 (Eric Santner) 在政治神学方面的工作以及第十一站对威廉·莎士比亚 (William Shakespeare) 和赫尔曼·梅尔维尔 (Herman Melville) 作品的互文使用，以描述气候变化小说中处于危险之中的生命与形式之间的各种相互作用。