The End of the World? Eco-dystopias from a Posthumanist Perspective

Abstract

This article aims to provide a presentation of the monograph “The End of the World? Eco-dystopias from a Posthumanist Perspective” of Pangeas. Interdisciplinary Journal of Ecocriticism. After a brief introduction, I offer, based on the studies of Serpil Oppermann (2016a; 2016b) and Serenella Iovino (2016) a theoretical approach to the intertwining of material ecocriticism and critical posthumanism. Defining the main characteristics of posthumanist ecocriticism, a new definition of matter, and thus, of the human is glimpsed, but from an already post-anthropocentric perspective, which rejects human superiority and the idea that nature can be controlled by us. Special attention will be paid to the concept of matter as a narrative agent, capable of creating stories, a conception that serves as a perfect starting point to talk about literature. In the following of these introductory notes, I focus on the summary of the articles that make up this monograph, with special attention to the main theme: the representation of eco-dystopia. From the theoretical and critical approaches offered by the contributions gathered here, we come to know a wide range of possibilities of interpretation—especially aesthetic, ethical and political—of literary works that seem to be concerned with the consequences of the intervention and apparent domination of nature by human beings (especially from the concept of the Anthropocene), through the representation of an (post-)apocalyptic world, where humans must necessarily adapt, and thus, hybridize or even metamorphose in order to survive. Despite being this a predominantly pessimistic narrative, which follows the (post-)apocalyptic and dystopian cultural and literary traditions, there are also works that, surprisingly, are optimistic when it comes to outlining futures where the human can co-exist with the non-human, sharing porous or even non-existent borders with it.