A New Story for the Anthropocene: Partial Knowledge and the New Weird in Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation
My thesis explores how we study, discuss, and ultimately tell stories for the Anthropocene. Due to the complexity of the concept as well as the different ways that disciplines approach how they study and write about the Anthropocene, it is challenging to settle on one dominant narrative or way of thinking about the Anthropocene. Because the Anthropocene forces us to consider much larger scales of space and time, attempting to comprehend and understand the full context of the Anthropocene can feel impossible, the concept and climate change becoming a massive unknown. Our current knowledge and knowledge systems seem insufficient in providing concrete explanations, answers, and forms of action. This can lead to a focus on the negatives, not just mass species extinctions, the destruction of natural spaces, and natural disasters, but also on the lack of power and control that comes from not knowing.Rather than allowing the acknowledgment of the unknown to only lead to despair, paralysis, or denial, I argue that we should strive for a state of partial knowledge, realizing that there are certain things about the nonhuman world that will always remain unknown and incomprehensible to us. We may never be able to understand the full scale of the complex systems that we exist within, but rather than refusing to act until we have more or all of the answers, or claim that all of the outcomes of the Anthropocene are completely out of our control, this state of partial knowledge encourages us to explore what these boundaries in what is known and unknown suggest about our place in the nonhuman world and reconsider what the destruction of the boundaries between the human and nonhuman world would mean.I do this by exploring two weird texts, H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. In both texts, the protagonists and readers are introduced to unknown forces that — similar to the Anthropocene — defy what we think we know about the world. However, while Lovecraft’s Cthulhu drives all who attempt to know it insane and push for a rejection of knowledge entirely, Vandermeer’s Area X depicts the ways that the confrontation with the unknown can be a transformative experience, one that allows for alternative responses to the Anthropocene like acceptance and hope.
English literature, Anthropocene, Eco-criticism, New Weird
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