Studies in the Literary Imagination

Technology makes reality come true.

—Don DeLillo, Underworld 177

And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.

—St. Augustine, quoted in DeLillo, Zero K 240

The scientific community disagrees over the date of the beginning of the Anthropocene. According to William Ruddiman, who proposed the "early Anthropocene" hypothesis, the onset of this era can be located some eight thousand years ago. The Anthropocene Working Group, set up by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and also supported by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who is credited with coining the term in 2000, has suggested that the Anthropocene was ushered in by the Industrial Revolution (c. 1800 CE) (see "Anthropocene," "Anthropocene Working"). Alternatively, the dawn of the Nuclear Age in the mid-1940s has been pinpointed as the dawn of the Anthropocene. Regardless of its still debatable origin, the concept itself can be applied productively for cultural and literary analysis. As a yet informal scientific term that still needs to be validated, the Anthropocene denotes a geological epoch marked by a new scale of human activity and agency that follows the Holocene. It highlights the extent of the impact of human activities—global and irreversible—on the state of our planet, especially on climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation. Taking into consideration the steep rise in the damaging effects of industrial development on the environment since the middle of the twentieth century, scientists have also identified the Anthropocene as the age of "Great Acceleration."¹ There are social and literary critics, however, who dissent from using the term Anthropocene but share a similar view on the status quo and a similar insistence on [End Page 91] devising a plan for action. A case in point here is Donna Haraway, who prefers to use the term Chthulucene in her text on experimental futures, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. It is a coinage of hers, which merges the two Greek roots khthṓn ("ground," "soil," "earth") and kainós ("new," "fresh"). Haraway defines this concept as a "timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth" (Staying 2).

Vital responses to the Anthropocene appear in ecocriticism and environmental humanities as well as in Anthropocene fictions. There is a steady awareness in all of these responses that the social and cultural dimensions of the Anthropocene are revealed not only in present challenges but also in hypothetical future developments and in the potentially disastrous consequences for ecosystems and humans alike. Several important studies have been published recently focusing on the intersections between ecocriticism and the imagination.² A recent collection of essays, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, explores the representation of Anthropocene-related issues in art in all its myriad forms. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, and Heather Anne Swanson, as editors of this volume, make the claim that "anthropogenic landscapes" today are haunted both by past ways of life and by imagined futures. The authors are deeply troubled by our "era of human destruction," which focuses only on the "immediate promises of power and profits" and the willingness to "destroy atmospheres, sell out companion species in exchange for dreamworlds of progress" (G2). What such critical texts hold in common is the urgent appeal to re-examine and re-configure human relations with the earth and with its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. They do so with determination deriving from the shared belief that we live on the verge of an extinction event to take place within the next 240–540 years, according to scientific projections (Barnosky et al. 55). Such an event could be comparable in scale to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which occurred 65 million years ago and killed off the dinosaurs along with 75% of all life forms on the planet, as suggested by Barnosky et al. (51).

Anthropocene fictions, written in the genre of the novel, often dealing with the...