End-Holocene Realism: The Contemporary Novel between Epochs
Gutman, Jennifer M.
0009-0005-6289-5289
:
2023-07-10
Abstract
End-Holocene Realism: The Contemporary Novel between Epochs gathers a body of contemporary fiction that mobilizes the sensitive instrument of the realist novel toward the work of epochal attunement, a process that presents acts of witnessing, mourning, naming, valuing, and recording as prerequisites for adapting to the moral and existential demands of life on a changing planet. Reading comparatively across a group of 21st-century novels that inherit and reconstitute Anglo-American novel traditions, I identify how a new age of incalculable risk alters a form that has long centered the regularity of middle-class life. Works by Tom McCarthy, Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Jesmyn Ward, Rumaan Alam, Richard Powers, Annie Proulx, and Joy Williams imagine a world characterized by epochal antinomies, oscillating between endings and beginnings, agency and contingency, cumulative loss and latent possibility. Featuring detached, searching narrators who drift through seemingly familiar but uncannily altered worlds, end-Holocene fiction bears witness to the failed projects of empire and nation and question the possibilities for art and self-actualization in a threatened and newly potentiated present. Taken together, these novels challenge the efficacy of narrative world-building in a time irreversibly marked by human interference and instead develop repositories of an overwhelming present from which alternate modes of interpretation and storytelling might emerge.