Coming back down to Earth: the novel and the human condition in the Anthropocene

Schoene, Berthold ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6536-9093 (2024) Coming back down to Earth: the novel and the human condition in the Anthropocene. English Studies, 105 (4). pp. 587-605. ISSN 0013-838X

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Abstract

Has the novel got what it takes to capture the human condition in the Anthropocene? Reading Martin MacInnes’ In Ascension (2023) as an exemplary Anthropocene novel, I argue that the fixation of many prominent critics on the subject of climate change alone has hampered a more comprehensive appraisal of Anthropocene fiction. Drawing on work by Stacy Alaimo, Hannah Arendt and David Chandler, and deploying Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality as a strategy for problematising the alleged Anthropocene split of humanist man into homo and anthropos, I link MacInnes’ formal innovation to his adaptation of long-established existential tropes and world-making paradigms, such as “the body,” “the human condition” and “hope”. The aim is to examine the impact the Anthropocene is having on our understanding and experience of the human, and to defend the novel form’s ongoing preoccupation with individual psychobiography as enabling our comprehension of the human within a new multi-scalar configuration of more-than-human meaning-making borrowed from earth system science.