Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

How do physical things differ from non-things—human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis—that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted. Acknowledgments Contents Table of Figures 1 Introduction 2 Object-Oriented Plotting 3 The Ethics of Materiality in the Multimodal Novel 4 Curating the Anthropocene Museum 5 The Fetish, the Grotesque, and the Castaway 6 Materializing Survival Games 7 The Office Weird 8 Mind among Material Ruins 9 Infrastructure and Collectivity in Video Games 10 Epilogue: Embracing the Spectrum Works Cited Index