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1. Object, Genre, Life
It is a commonplace that climate change constitutes a formal challenge to the customary rhythms, patterns, and scales of the novel. Still, literary criticism on climate change fiction has so far to a large extent evaded the question of form, and dissolved it into questions of genres and objects. Let’s begin with the recourse to objects. Enlisting the support of object-oriented ontology or actor-network theory, such accounts resituate literature in assemblages of nonhuman, natural, and technological objects with which it colludes in unpredictable ways. In such constellations, literary works function as particular objects, not as formal constructs; they interact with audiences, corporations, sciences, and bureaucracies to make up the reality we know as climate change. As this reality is constructed “through a complex, unstable negotiation among texts, readers, and things,” literary works circulate within “new networks of humans and nonhumans” that together give social currency to scientific insights into planetary change (Trexler 74, 57). Climate change, as a matter of concern rather than a mere matter of fact, is not shaped or reflected by literary form, but emerges through the interaction of literary and non-literary objects. Indeed, when climate change is understood, with Timothy Morton, as a hyperobject, it is defined as something that eschews representation, and that is intimated precisely in the breakdown of literary form. Planetary change remains fundamentally unrepresentable, and for critics like Morton, literature must first of all register the insufficiency of traditional modes of expression and representation. Form, in Timothy Clark’s words, is merely “something to be interrupted, broken or questioned” (187). Literature can show how it has been disrupted and distorted by the temporally and spatially distributed process we call climate change, and it can display its failure to contain it, but it cannot subsume that affliction “as a matter of the intended form” (Ashton).
Literary criticism has so far been more attuned to “[r]epresentational obstacles” and “imaginative shortcomings” in the literary engagement with climate change than to literature’s achievements (Bond et al. 857). When it upholds these achievements, it tends to situate them in terms of genre; and if we understand genre as a “codification of discursive properties” (Todorov 162) or an “affectual contract” between text and reader (Berlant 847), it becomes clear that...