Ben De Bruyn

Introduction: Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction

This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demanding wholesale recalibration of economic and political priorities; destabilising the epistemic frameworks through which quotidian life is interpreted and enacted; and decentring the dominant cultural imaginaries that seek to give form to historical experience

Realism 4°. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10:04

ABSTRACTA rare example of a contemporary climate-change novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 joins reflections on our increasingly unrecognisable planet with a remarkably realist attention to everyday life. This paper examines three aspects of the book’s environmentally inflected realism in more detail. In response to Adam Trexler’s account of Anthropocene fiction, it begins by examining Lerner’s expansive representation of global commodities and planetary memorials. Turning from objects to subjects, the paper subsequently enlists Roland Barthes’s late work on reference to describe Lerner’s attention to weird weather and its destabilising effects on our bodies and epiphanies. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the social infrastructure underlying the circulation of objects and subjects, highlighting the novel’s emphasis on the community-building as well as resource-depleting dimensions of our petromodernity. Via these three steps, the paper demonstrates, first, the importance of a newly expansive mode of cu...ABSTRACT A rare example of a contemporary climate-change novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 joins reflections on our increasingly unrecognisable planet with a remarkably realist attention to everyday life. This paper examines three aspects of the book’s environmentally inflected realism in more detail. In response to Adam Trexler’s account of Anthropocene fiction, it begins by examining Lerner’s expansive representation of global commodities and planetary memorials. Turning from objects to subjects, the paper subsequently enlists Roland Barthes’s late work on reference to describe Lerner’s attention to weird weather and its destabilising effects on our bodies and epiphanies. The analysis concludes with a discussion of the social infrastructure underlying the circulation of objects and subjects, highlighting the novel’s emphasis on the community-building as well as resource-depleting dimensions of our petromodernity. Via these three steps, the paper demonstrates, first, the importance of a newly expansive mode of cultural memory, related to capitalism, weather and energy, and second, that not just science fiction but also modified forms of realism may play an important role in cultural responses to climate change.

Polyphony beyond the Human: Animals, Music, and Community in Coetzee and Powers

Abstract:Taking issue with the anthropocentric assumptions behind classic and recent work on sound in the novel, this paper draws attention to animal vocalizations in the writings of J. M. Coetzee and Richard Powers. As the nonhuman voices in Disgrace (1999), The Echo Maker (2006), and Orfeo (2014) reveal, novels do not just register the polyphony of human voices made famous by Mikhail Bakhtin, but also hint at a broader ‘polyphony beyond the human.’ Zooming in on a particular set of images, the paper subsequently examines how attentive listening and the idea of music help to connect and disconnect particular sets of humans and other animals. Bearing in mind earlier literary accounts of animal sounds, these contemporary novels combine older features like semiotic confusion with new elements like a preoccupation with biodiversity loss.

La passion aristocratique de l’Occident. Denis de Rougemont : lecteur d’une tradition, prophète d’un déclin

Durant l’entre-deux-guerres, le questionnement relatif a l’identite et au devenir du monde occidental apparait comme preponderant, a l’echelle europeenne. L’Amour et l’Occident, publie en 1939 par Denis de Rougemont est exemplaire a cet egard. L’auteur s’y livre a une reflexion sur le destin de la civilisation a laquelle il appartient en envisageant la naissance et le developpement du roman, depuis la periode medievale, comme la source et le symptome majeurs d’un declin. Dans cette perspective, la mobilisation du paradigme nobiliaire sous-tend une interrogation qui engage un positionnement historique et axiologique specifiques. L’intellectuel suisse configure un ethos valorisant, a l’encontre d’une dynamique historique de declin marquee par le regne des vulgarites bourgeoises de la technique et du calcul. Ce faisant, il promeut une conception de l’avenir fondee sur un engagement auquel il importe de se montrer fidele, en vertu d’une ethique et d’une esthetique resolument placees sous le signe de la noblesse.

Anthropocene Audio: The Animal Soundtrack of the Contemporary Novel

ABSTRACT Establishing a preliminary dialogue between sound studies and animal studies, this article investigates the representation of animal sounds in the contemporary novel. Focusing particularly on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, and Tom McCarthy’s C, it highlights the way in which these novels register and celebrate endangered sounds on the one hand and hybrid, biotechnological sounds on the other, thereby unearthing an overlooked aspect of our cultural response to species extinction and the ongoing technological mediation of the nonhuman world.