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A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt.Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.

French fiction --- Literature and society --- Realism in literature. --- Dystopias in literature. --- Despair in literature. --- History and criticism. --- History

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Recent decades have brought to light the staggering ubiquity of human activity upon Earth and the startling fragility of our planet and its life systems. This is so momentous that many scientists and scholars now argue that we have left the relative climactic stability of the Holocene and have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. This emerging epoch may prompt us not only to reconsider our understanding of Earth systems, but also to reimagine ourselves and what it means to be human. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways, mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.

Research & information: general --- Biology, life sciences --- Ecological science, the Biosphere --- globalization --- climate change --- Anthropocene --- planetarity --- jeremiad --- anthropocene --- saving grace --- rhetoric --- doomsday --- spiritual crisis --- eco-anxiety --- despair --- hope --- virtue --- climate crisis --- selfhood --- personhood --- Spirit --- Christology --- breathing --- self-loss --- transformed self --- Book of Nature --- Hugh of Saint Victor --- Bruno Latour --- Timothy Morton --- Slavoj Žižek --- ecology and religion --- eco-theology --- predation --- food --- ecology --- Eucharist --- Earth --- sacrament --- ritual --- resurrection --- Plumwood --- Abram --- sacred --- Yellowstone --- Bhutan --- Jordan River --- religion --- multispecies --- ecotheology --- novelty --- postcolonial ecocriticism --- Derek Walcott --- theodicy --- poetics --- wonder --- eschatology --- Noah --- Adam and Eve --- grief and mourning --- extinction --- climate humanism --- ecocriticism --- faith --- vulnerability --- environment

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Recent decades have brought to light the staggering ubiquity of human activity upon Earth and the startling fragility of our planet and its life systems. This is so momentous that many scientists and scholars now argue that we have left the relative climactic stability of the Holocene and have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. This emerging epoch may prompt us not only to reconsider our understanding of Earth systems, but also to reimagine ourselves and what it means to be human. How does the Earth’s precarious state reveal our own? How does this vulnerable condition prompt new ways of thinking and being? The essays that are part of this collection consider how the transformative thinking demanded by our vulnerability inspires us to reconceive our place in the cosmos, alongside each other and, potentially, before God. Who are we “after” (the concept of) the Anthropocene? What forms of thought and structures of feeling might attend us in this state? How might we determine our values and to what do we orient our hopes? Faith, a conceptual apparatus for engaging the unseen, helps us weigh the implications of this massive, but in some ways, mysterious, force on the lives we lead; faith helps us visualize what it means to exist in this new and still emergent reality.

Research & information: general --- Biology, life sciences --- Ecological science, the Biosphere --- globalization --- climate change --- Anthropocene --- planetarity --- jeremiad --- anthropocene --- saving grace --- rhetoric --- doomsday --- spiritual crisis --- eco-anxiety --- despair --- hope --- virtue --- climate crisis --- selfhood --- personhood --- Spirit --- Christology --- breathing --- self-loss --- transformed self --- Book of Nature --- Hugh of Saint Victor --- Bruno Latour --- Timothy Morton --- Slavoj Žižek --- ecology and religion --- eco-theology --- predation --- food --- ecology --- Eucharist --- Earth --- sacrament --- ritual --- resurrection --- Plumwood --- Abram --- sacred --- Yellowstone --- Bhutan --- Jordan River --- religion --- multispecies --- ecotheology --- novelty --- postcolonial ecocriticism --- Derek Walcott --- theodicy --- poetics --- wonder --- eschatology --- Noah --- Adam and Eve --- grief and mourning --- extinction --- climate humanism --- ecocriticism --- faith --- vulnerability --- environment --- globalization --- climate change --- Anthropocene --- planetarity --- jeremiad --- anthropocene --- saving grace --- rhetoric --- doomsday --- spiritual crisis --- eco-anxiety --- despair --- hope --- virtue --- climate crisis --- selfhood --- personhood --- Spirit --- Christology --- breathing --- self-loss --- transformed self --- Book of Nature --- Hugh of Saint Victor --- Bruno Latour --- Timothy Morton --- Slavoj Žižek --- ecology and religion --- eco-theology --- predation --- food --- ecology --- Eucharist --- Earth --- sacrament --- ritual --- resurrection --- Plumwood --- Abram --- sacred --- Yellowstone --- Bhutan --- Jordan River --- religion --- multispecies --- ecotheology --- novelty --- postcolonial ecocriticism --- Derek Walcott --- theodicy --- poetics --- wonder --- eschatology --- Noah --- Adam and Eve --- grief and mourning --- extinction --- climate humanism --- ecocriticism --- faith --- vulnerability --- environment