Before the end : imagining extinction In 21st-century American fiction

Abstract

This thesis examines a subgenre of texts which I define as extinction narratives: texts which explore the possibility of human extinction. Contemplating human extinction poses conceptual and narratological difficulties and encourages us to think beyond the bounds of human experience, considering worlds after and outside of our own. Similarly, the Anthropocene requires thinking beyond the scope of human experience, and even human imagination, connecting the present with far-futures that exist outside of our conceptualisation and narrativization. By confronting the reader with the im possibility of conceptualising extinction, extinction narratives take the reader to the limits of human experience, encouraging a consideration of the world beyond those anthropocentric parameters. Extinction narratives also challenge prevalent frameworks of global catastrophe that use apocalyptic paradigms which retain ideals of redemption, renewal, and salvation following the moment of catastrophe; consequently, they move away from anthropocentric framings of catastrophe that risk enforcing ideas of human exceptionalism and the presumption of human endurance. My thesis demonstrates how extinction narratives engage with the complexity of thinking extinction through a formal and narrative experimentation which both responds to and reflects the ungraspable awareness of humanity’s long-lasting negative impact on the planet. I explore how extinction impacts notions of futurities and posterity, arguing that by disrupting these more ‘traditional’ notions, the texts open up to alternative interpretations of archivy and intergenerational connection that can be productively utilised when considering the scales of the Anthropocene. I show how these narratives trouble anthropocentric thinking by deconstructing the understanding of the human as exceptional and separate, instead drawing attention to the human as being similar to and assembled with the nonhuman world. I argue that this non-anthropocentric framing can encourage an interconnectedness that is vital whilst under the self-inflicted threat of environmental crisis.