Publications
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Strange birds and uncertain futures in Anthropocene fiction Ghent University
Object-oriented plotting and nonhuman realities in DeLillo’s Underworld and Iñárritu’s Babel Ghent University
Negotiating stories in the Anthropocene : the case of Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth Ghent University
It is almost a trope in contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene to call for new narratives that are able to convey the scale of the ecological crisis. When does a narrative become new, however? In this article, I build on Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s theory of narrative in culture to develop a preliminary answer to that question. I first explore the field of Anthropocene discourse and chart the ways in which stories about the ecological ...
We-narrative and the challenges of nonhuman collectives Ghent University
Narrative theory is devoting increasing attention to we-narrative and, more generally, stories that center on groups. However, the we in question tends to be a human one. In this article, I argue that narrative can also foreground nonhuman assemblages (animals, plants, material objects, etc.) and can employ this focus to question anthropocentric assumptions. I discuss two examples: Tinkers (2009), by Paul Harding, in which a more-than-human we ...
Flocking together : collective animal minds in contemporary fiction Ghent University
The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a full-fledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective ...
Embodiment and the cosmic perspective in twentieth-century fiction Ghent University
In dialogue with groundbreaking technologies and scientific models, twentieth century fiction presents readers with a vast mosaic of perspectives on the cosmos. The literary imagination of the world beyond the human scale, however, faces a fundamental difficulty: if, as researchers in both cognitive science and narrative theory argue, fiction is a practice geared toward the human embodied mind, how can it cope with scientific theories and ...
The Gesamtkunstwerk and the nonhuman in digital media Ghent University
Immersion for entangled audiences : the nonhuman world and affective patterning in narrative experiences Ghent University
The language of “immersion” in a fictional text lends itself to a dualistic reading that is, at best, unwelcome when attempting to think about narrative experiences ecologically. In this article, I argue for a model of narrative-audience interactions that privileges immersion as affective and temporal entanglement in stories over the containment model. I use Le quattro volte, a 2010 film by Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino, to exemplify ...