New Ecological Realisms

New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory (forthcoming, Edinburgh UP, 2021)

What is the singular reality of humanistic objects of study? To appreciate this, New Ecological Realisms argues, we need a new concept of the real that hinges on, instead of denying, organization and form. Advocating for a new contextual realism of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks, and ecologies, New Ecological Realisms brings together four groups of theories/theorists that have never been considered together before, and who formulate such context-based realisms: Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Markus Gabriel, Jean-Luc Marion, and Alphonso Lingis. This study further proposes that literature constitutes an important source of such new ontologies of organized wholes. Examining post-apocalyptic literature (by Margaret Atwood, JosĂ© Saramago, Octavia Butler, and Cormac McCarthy) that depicts life after the destruction of modern civilization effected by pandemics and climate change, New Ecological Realisms argues that post-apocalyptic fiction also embeds a new contextual vision of the real, which is enacted in the narrative mode of apocalyptic endism.

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