Weird Ghosts of the Anthropocene: The Spectral Encounter in New Weird Fiction as a Conceptual Metaphor for Ecocritical Theory

Authors

  • Elisa Mazzocato LMU Munich

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2024.15.2.5368

Keywords:

New Weird, spectrality, non-human, ecology, uncanny

Abstract

In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh links the reluctance of contemporary fiction to tackle the environmental crisis to the inadequacy of realism, with which Western “high” literature has been associated since the rise of the modern novel, to describe the “hyperobject” quality (Clark 140) of the Anthropocene. This paper argues that the genre labeled as New Weird, which strives to portray the Unheimlich, the eerie, or precisely the weird in our familiar reality, offers an answer to this aesthetic challenge, having found an especially powerful literary device in spectral encounters. In the works of New Weird author China Miéville, environmental concerns are often embodied by the encounter of human protagonists with the ghostly apparitions of non-human entities, from icebergs floating in the sky over London to a sunken oil platform re-emerging from the sea. A close reading of three stories from his collection Three Moments of an Explosion, “Polynia”, “Covehithe” and “Estate”, will show how Miéville’s portrayal of people’s behavior in encountering ‘weird’ spectral presences bear a specific ecological significance. This significance, which is common to many different authors of New Weird fiction, reverberates in the use of spectrality as a conceptual metaphor in contemporary ecocritical theory, thus corroborating the claim of this genre as the most productive for our historical times.

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Author Biography

Elisa Mazzocato, LMU Munich

Elisa Mazzocato is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Language and Literature at LMU Munich. She holds a dual master's degree from the University of Trento and the TU Dresden, and initiated her research career with an internship at the Vienna Anthropocene Network (University of Vienna). Her research interests encompass 20th-century German literature, German-Swiss literature, the Great Acceleration, Anthropocene studies, and ecocriticism.

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Published

2024-10-30

Issue

Section

Articles:Disruptive Encounters.Concepts of care and Contamination out of Control