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Chapter 16 - The Future in the Anthropocene: Extinction and the Imagination

from Part III - Application

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 July 2019

By
Claire Colebrook
Edited by
Adeline Johns-Putra
Adeline Johns-Putra
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

This chapter investigates the effect of climate change (along with the host of other anthropogenic effects on the planet that now fall under the rubric of the Anthropocene) on the concept of extinction, particularly, human extinction. Whereas previous concepts of human extinction - from religious apocalyptic to Darwinian evolutionary discourses - were capable of imagining extinction as an event of grandeur and promise of something greater, extinction in the Anthropocene is figured as a moment of profound and abject loss, namely, the loss not just of humans but of particular configuration of capitalist comfort and consumerism. This chapter examines the history of this now dominant perception of extinction, via Enlightenment, Romantic and modernist thought.

Keywords

Anthropoceneextinctionapocalypseevolutioncapitalismclimate fictionImmanuel KantWilliam BlakeMary Shelley
Type
Chapter
Information
Climate and Literature , pp. 263 - 280
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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