The Stuff of This World: Martin MacInnes, Posthuman Porosity, and Anthropocene Fiction

Details

Supervisors

De Bruyn, Ben

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en langues et lettres modernes, orientation générale, à finalité approfondie

Abstract

The novel’s response to and the degree to which it can accommodate anthropogenic climate change and its impact on the human condition in the Anthropocene is a pivotal concern for contemporary literary criticism. The purpose of this research is to address this problem by reaching beyond the restrictive category of cli-fi, expanding the corpus of environmental inquiry to Anthropocene fiction, and therefore including texts unconcerned with the climate crisis as a core theme. This research aligns with the questions asked by posthuman ecocriticism and its commitment to examining the material involvement of bodies and Nature within a post-green framework. These tools are coupled with recent developments in philosophical thought, genre studies, eco-gothic studies, and spatial literary studies, that tackle the interplay between literature and the Anthropocene. The central concept explored is porosity, both on the material level, examining humanity’s permeability to nonhuman matter, and on the figurative level, addressing the categories of genre and setting. The three novels written by Martin MacInnes—"Infinite Ground," "Gathering Evidence," and "In Ascension"—constitute a corpus representative of Anthropocene fiction and compelling articulations of the problem of porosity. This problem is explored in three stages: first, by examining the disintegration of the subject/environment binary in relation to genre; second, by analysing the undermining of the notion of environment with respect to setting; and finally, by investigating the dissolution of the body of characters. Importantly, the porosity in MacInnes’s fiction extends beyond the darkness of post-green thinking, offering hopeful perspectives on human-environmental relationships. This thesis is also an opportunity to delineate salient features of the poetics of an author hardly considered in contemporary scholarship.