Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality

Download or read book Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality written by Marco Caracciolo and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.