How Literature Comes to Matter: Post-Anthropocentric Approaches to Fiction (New Materialisms)

How Literature Comes to Matter revolves around the central question of how “matter comes to matter” (Barad) in literature. The book offers an interdisciplinary encounter between literary criticism and post-anthropocentric theory such as new materialist and object-oriented studies. Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, the book shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within ‘the material turn’, the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine how new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways and generates new dimensions of reading as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman agencies and realities. The collection includes critical perspectives from narratology, feminism, queer studies, postcolonialism, capitalist criticism and Anthropocene criticism. It contains an afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on literary analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi. The introduction gives a general overview of the material turn and a focused introduction to central post-anthropocentric concerns and key concepts within New Materialism and Object-Oriented Ontology, highlighting their philosophical backdrops and interventions, their differences and similarities as well as their relevance to the study of literature. Acknowledgements 8 Preface 9 Notes on Contributors 11 Introduction 14 I. Matter-Oriented Perspectives on Literary Techniques, Language and Representation 42 1. The Abundance of Things in the Midst of Writing: A Post-Anthropocentric View on Description and Georges Perec’s ‘Still Life/Style Leaf’ 44 2. Slow Narrative and the Perception of Material Forms 62 II. Object Intrusions in Subject-Centric Texts 84 3. Aisthetic Realities in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born: A Matter-Oriented Reading of Postcolonial Literature 86 4. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips’: On the Hostile Nature of Things 106 5. ‘We have nothing to be arrogant about’ – Hans Christian Andersen and Anti-Anthropocentrism 122 III. Carnal Realities: Lively Flesh in Feminist and Queer Readings 142 6. Feminist New Materialism and Literary Studies: Methodological Meditations on the Tradition of Feminist Literary Criticism and (Post)Critique 144 7. Djuna Barnes and Queer Interiorities 166 8. Corporeal Creativity and Queer Gaps in Time 185 IV. Capitalism, Crisis and the Anthropocene 204 9. Putting the Earth to Use: Reading Resources in the End Times (Through Science Fiction) 206 10. Dry Ontology and Finance Capitalism: A Material–Affective Reading of Financial Crisis Fiction 227 11. The Work of Art in the Age of Capitalist Realism: Materiality/Aura/Apocalypse 249 Afterword: Woodenness – The (Palm) Heart of the Matter 270 Index 279 An interdisciplinary encounter between new materialist and object-oriented studies and literary criticism. Provides an overview of central postanthropocentric concerns and key concepts within New Materialism and object-oriented ontology. Illustrates how the material turn and post-anthropocentric theory open new sides to the study of literature, including feminist, queer, postcolonial and anthropocene studies of literature. Includes hands-on suggestions of how to approach the significance of non-human materialities in literary depictions of the world. Through a rethinking of the relationship between the subject and object, the human and the nonhuman, this volume shows how literature and post-anthropocentric theory can illuminate each other in mutually productive ways. Focusing on how the study of literature is an underdeveloped field within 'the material turn', the introduction and each of the eleven chapters examine ways in which new materialist and object-oriented theory opens the study of literature in new ways just as they demonstrate the deep entanglements in literature of human and nonhuman realities. The collection includes an Afterword by Timothy Morton and hands-on analyses and close readings of individual works by such diverse writers as Hans Christian Andersen, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Plath, Georges Perec, Ayi Kwei Armah, Jeanette Winterson and Paolo Bacigalupi