CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Florian Mussgnug (Post)-Apocalyptic Anthropocene: Diachronic Relations
My project focuses on Transhistorical Speculative Fiction (TSF): an emergent genre that is represented here by a preliminary corpus of twenty-five contemporary novels in five languages. Each of these texts is arranged as a transhistorical triptych, with different parts set, respectively, in the author’s past, present and imagined (apocalyptic) future. Temporal juxtaposition serves to highlight the materiality of loss – dwindling resources, dying species, forgotten words and cultural practices – as well as bonds of responsibility between communities, across generations, and between humans and non-humans.
My analysis of TSF demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of apocalyptic thinking in the Twenty-First Century. It also shows how cultural attention to linear time and world-shattering rupture, in mainstream apocalyptic discourse, stands in the way of more complex and probing critical engagements with non-human temporalities. The unfolding planetary emergency demands forms of linguistic and conceptual inventiveness that can alert readers to unfamiliar and counterintuitive temporal and spatial scales. TSF responds to this demand with disruptive, self-reflective apocalyptic storytelling that is attentive to material entanglement and that draws its force from non-anthropocentric knowledge practices and imaginative frameworks.