Jeff Vandermeer

This chapter, “Becoming-instrument: Thinking with Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects”, considers first-person narration and empathic enactment of fictional experience from posthumanist and enactivist perspectives. It introduces a new methodological device called “becoming-instrument”, which opens the reader’s experience to nonhuman influences. Building on Marco Caracciolo’s (2014) claims about empathic engagement with first-person narratives and Merja Polvinen’s (2012) notion of self-aware readerly engagement, the chapter’s author Kaisa Kortekallio argues that engagement with estranging first-person narratives, such as Annihilation and Hyperobjects, can work toward dissolving the certainty of the human subject and develop in its stead a model of subjectivity as “multiple and always-in-progress” (Sherryl Vint 2005).

Annihilation (2014) and Hyperobjects (2013) both invite the reader to enact the affective experientiality of their first-person narrators, but they also foreground the fictionality of those narrators. The chapter argues that affective experientiality and awareness of fictionality can intertwine in the readerly experience, and that the combination of affectivity and self-referentiality is characteristic of the “dark” or “weird” ecology VanderMeer and Morton advance in their texts. Finally, Kortekallio suggests that the dynamic of enactment applies not only to explicitly fictional narrative techniques but also to the rhetorical devices employed in non-fiction texts – such as the rhetorical “I” in Hyperobjects.

While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.

'Reading Mutant Narratives' explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of 'mutant narratives.' Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction
that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction.
The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied.
As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also
estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of 'embodied estrangement.'
Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, 'performative enactivism,' that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.

In a 2015 article in The Guardian Robert Macfarlane argued that the English tradition of the “eerie” was enjoying a renewed vigour among the writers and artists of the British Isles.  Through literature, song, theatre and film these devotees of “occulture” turned an eye to the sinister aspects of the green and pleasant land, unearthing the “skull beneath the skin of the countryside” in “an attempt to account for the turbulence of England in the era of late capitalism.”  Working from Mark Fisher's 2016 study The Weird and the Eerie, this paper first seeks to differentiate the aesthetic mode of the eerie from other closely-related horror affects (such as the weird and the uncanny) and then examine the role the eerie plays in mediating the anxieties of a post-industrial, pre-Brexit Britain, giving voice to existential uncertainties, political dissension and fears of environmental collapse.  The horror fictions of M. R. James and Arthur Machen are examined in relation to scientific developments of the
nineteenth century, with the eerie in their work found to be a manifestation of the anxieties brought about by the erosion of humanity's preeminence in the world.  In contrast to this Victorian anthropocentrism, the work of J. G. Ballard, Jeff VanderMeer and Gary Budden embraces the eerie as a means of further eroding the conceit of anthropocentrism and, particularly in the latter two, challenging capitalist ideologies and disrupting narratives of xenophobia through radical notions of belonging.

This paper investigates and compares language and imagery used by contemporary ecocritics in order to argue that the Anthropocene discourse contains significant parallels to cosmic horror discourse and (new) weird literature. While monsters from the traditional, Lovecraftian weird lend themselves well to Anthropocene allegory due to the coinciding fear affect in both discourses, the new weird genre experiments with ways to move beyond cosmic fear, thereby reimagining the human position in the context of the Anthropocene. Jeff VanderMeer's trilogy The Southern Reach (2014) presents an alien system of assimilation and ecological mutation into which the characters are launched. It does this in a manner that brings into question human hierarchical coexistence with nonhumans while also exposing the ineffectiveness of current existential norms. This paper argues that new weird stories such as VanderMeer's are able to rework and dispel the fearful paralysis of cosmic horror found in Lovecraft's literature and of Anthropocene monsters in ecocritical debate. The Southern Reach and the new weird welcome the monstrous as kin rather than enemy.

and Jeff, mid-morning, at his Tallahassee, Florida home. Our conversation speaks to the concepts raised in the essays collected here in Surreal Entanglements, especially in the context of his book Dead Astronauts (published in December 2019). 1 We've edited the text slightly for readability and points of clarification, but have otherwise left it conversational. Thanks to Jeff VanderMeer for his time and thoughts, and to the editors Laura Shackelford and Louise Economides for inviting us to contribute in this way to the book.

The study seeks to analyze Jeff Vander Meer’s ‘Borne’ (2017) and ‘Dead Astronauts’ (2019) to describe how
the shaping power of monstrosity, weirdness, complexity, and grotesquery in a post-apocalyptic setting can
best be appreciated once one applies certain religious tropes for the analysis of the unfolding of the events in
the novel. In post-apocalyptic settings of the novels mentioned above, Biblical tropes can help connect the
present situation to a past that otherwise exists as a dead and desolate wasteland devoid of any meaning. For
the purpose of formulating the theoretical framework, the study employs Foucault’s and Negri’s ideas of
monstrosity and Bakhtin’s idea of grotesque as its mainstay

[http://www.collateral-journal.com/index.php?cluster=15] Part of a double cluster of responses to Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy. Argues that theoretical invocations of "the weird" (in, among others, the work of Tim Morton) distort the literary affordances of the term.

Monica Sousa considers how VanderMeer’s biotech postapocalyptic novel Borne (2017) explores ideas of posthumanist empathy towards animals created through biotechnology. Borne follows a scavenger, Rachel, in the ruins of a nameless future city who finds Borne, an enigmatic hyper-advanced genetically produced organism, whose body and mental capabilities rapidly evolve, resulting in Rachel blurring the boundaries between plant, animal, and person. While Borne invites readers to consider how biotechnology can have dire consequences and to consider the implications and consequences of creating
genetically modified animals, a larger focus of Sousa’s chapter is to consider human responsibility towards these creations once they have been created, exploring posthumanist empathy in the novel, and further concerns about the notion of personhood.

Nel corso del 2014 lo scrittore Jeff VanderMeer, conosciuto come autore di Science Fiction e figura di riferimento del cosiddetto New Weird, ha pubblicato una trilogia, prontamente tradotta in italiano per Einaudi dall’ottima Cristiana Mennella

Lo spazio editoriale della fantascienza al femminile in Italia: una disamina a partire da alcune notazioni sociologiche e storiche, per giungere a commentare due uscite recenti, le traduzioni di The Power, della scrittrice inglese Naomi Alderman (Nottetempo 2017) e Sisters of the Revolution: A Feminist Speculative Fiction Anthology, antologia curata da Ann e Jeff VanderMeer (Nero 2018).

To grasp the contemporary is to make a statement about the future. From the New Puritans to the avant-pulp, from psycho-geography to the New Weird, the representation of ‘now’ is a central concern of contemporary fiction. It entails a concern with drawing distinctions, and making arguments for directions into the future.

What makes a fiction about the ‘contemporary’? We can consider texts contemporary in terms of how they break with traditions to represent the present or how they adapt traditions from their historical sources to the demands of the present. The question can be understood in terms of – for instance – grouping writers into modernism, inter-modernism, postmodernism and the contemporary, charting the stylistic and conceptual shifts against other cultural and political trends. Equally, we might study the development of a single writer across a particular period, using their work as a guideline for gaining perspective on shifts in popular cultural tastes. Then again, we might find it much more informative to study the development of a specific fictional mode or genre within a particular period.

This article will explore a range of approaches, from novels to anthologies, and diverse modes and genres, from science fiction and fantasy to postmodernism and psychogeographical fictions to address the question of how we grasp the 'contemporary' in contemporary fiction. 

Full article online; please follow the link to read more.

The study seeks to analyze Jeff Vander Meer’s ‘Borne’ (2017) and ‘Dead Astronauts’ (2019) to describe how the shaping power of monstrosity, weirdness, complexity, and grotesquery in a post-apocalyptic setting can best be appreciated once one applies certain religious tropes for the analysis of the unfolding of the events in the novel. In post-apocalyptic settings of the novels mentioned above, Biblical tropes can help connect the present situation to a past that otherwise exists as a dead and desolate wasteland devoid of any meaning. For the purpose of formulating the theoretical framework, the study employs Foucault’s and Negri’s ideas of monstrosity and Bakhtin’s idea of grotesque as its mainstay.

In questi giorni nelle riviste e nei blog di fantascienza il nome di Jeff VanderMeer è uno dei più citati, nel bene e nel male. Cosa è accaduto? Due eventi: la pubblicazione per Einaudi della traduzione italiana del suo ultimo romanzo, Borne, e la diffusione su Netflix del film ricavato dal primo dei tre romanzi dedicati all’Area X, Annihilation, trilogia pubblicata anch’essa da Einaudi due anni or sono, e recentemente riproposta in un unico volume.

Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014) takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as “the biologist.” It follows an expedition of four women into Area X, where monstrous creatures roam and all living things, including the biologist, undergo transitions as their DNA radically changes. This reading of the biologist’s journal presents it as not only a transition narrative but as a fictional transgender autobiography, sharing many similarities with the features of trans autobiography identified by Jay Prosser (1998). I argue that the biologist’s attempts to assert her identification of a topographical anomaly as the “tower” can be a metaphor for the struggle in trans autobiography for self-identification to be accepted as truth. Contextualizing Annihilation within current discourses in transecology, I make links to the rhetoric of blame on LGBTQIA+ people as the cause of environmental disasters. I conclude with a hopeful reading, which defies this blame, of the biologist’s statement that “I am not returning home,” as an ending of trans possibility. Trans people must constantly reassert and fight for our existence, so as a trans-identified scholar I hope to highlight transgender readings in unexpected places, showing that our experiences exist across all genres.

The paper consists of two bigger sections. In the first part, the details of the packetbook project are introduced. Within this project, various interactive, hermeneutical, drama pedagogy-based, and writing activity materials are created which are based on highly popular works of speculative fiction. The packetbook chapters on one hand can contribute to the popularization of reading among students, on the other, they can provide a fertile ground for interdisciplinary education which is based on literature. The second section of the paper is a specific packetbook chapter, which examines Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, touching on its world cunstruction, genre, motives, and the fear penetrating the whole narrative, which originates from the lack of information and the strangeness feeling of the Area X ecology. The work can be considered as a classroom excipient and as a new constantly expanding literature book, i.e. packetbook chapter, which discusses the Southern Reach Trilogy with the help of hermeneutical, interdisciplinary, group constructive, writing and creativity developing exercises.

KEYWORDS: packetbook chapter, interactive tasks, weird fiction, world construction, strangeness feeling

'The tower is breathing. There is no ambiguity about it' – Acceptance, p55.

Islands that turn out to be sea monsters, worlds encircled by serpents, poetic personification of skies and landscapes: metaphors of natural space as a living creature are nothing new. But the work of contemporary 'weird fiction' writer Jeff VanderMeer creates a radical new politics of biogeography for an Anthropocene audience: the encoding of our spatial environment as not just a single creature, but a living ecosystem dependent on a non-reducible complex interaction of micro-organisms, organic intelligences and climatic conditions. Focusing on VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance, all 2014), this article considers the implications of 'Area X', which is simultaneously a geographical space, a hostile intelligence, and an invasive 'terroir'. This terroir, a term taken from wine-making to mean the sum of all interacting environmental elements (organic and otherwise), attempts to reintegrate the trilogy's human characters into these interactions – to remodel them into a non-discrete, functioning element of an ecosystem – through parasitic infestation, decomposition and hyper-accelerated evolution.

I consider the acknowledged influence on VanderMeer's work of Rachel Carson, Jean Baudrillard and the anarchist Invisible Committee, to elucidate how the inherent instability of Area X's biogeographical spaces provides a decentred perspective on climate change and human interventions in the natural world, displacing anthrocentric cultural readings of the Anthropocene even as it illustrates the profound danger that human intelligence poses to the co-dependent ecosystems which sustain it.

Trespassing Journal, Issue 6, Winter 2017
Terror and Terroir: Porous Bodies and Environmental
Dangers
Brian Onishi
Eastern Michigan University
Abstract
A lasting consequence of Cartesian substance dualism is the idea that material activity is
fundamentally a result of efficient causality. One body moves another body by bumping into and
forcing the second body to move. A world reduced to such efficient causality also requires that bodies
are static, able to conform to the laws of physics and nature because they are ontologically dumb, both
in terms of existing without thought and without speech. Recent insights from quantum physics reveal
that this view of material bodies is too reductive and does not capture the full complexity of the
material world. The material world, rather, is fundamentally unknowable and strange, porous and
agential. This paper will argue that the porous and diffractive intra-action of bodies opens up spaces
of ecological intensities that are both wonderful and dangerous. More specifically, I will appeal to the
intra-active bodies displayed in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and argue that bodies and
thoughts exist on a similar plain and that thoughts have a material existence.
VanderMeer’s trilogy depicts a kind of dangerous garden, an edenic ecology that expels
totalizing human understanding. It is only The Biologist that is capable of adapting to the
transformations induced by Area X because she embraces the porosity of her body and mind, emerging
as a body subject that erases the division between those dualistic poles. By the end of Acceptance, her
body expands to giant form, her previously bounded bodily limitations adapt to the meaning of Area
X’s edenic danger. In her monstrosity she embodies the tower’s text, bringing forth the “seeds of
death” to a world built on totalizing knowledge. She rejects the scientific attitude of her biological
training and becomes The Biologist, capable of shedding the restrictions of linguistic meaning to
communicate with the owl on the island, and perhaps even Area X itself. The tower’s text literally
bursts forth, penetrating the Biologists body, and dissolving the distinctions between body and mind,
and materiality and thought. Neither the text nor Area X causes this change in The Biologist because
prior to their intra-action there was neither Biologist nor text, nor even an Area X in the way she
encounters it. Rather, they are each constituted in the exchange, generating a new phenomenal object
that cannot be reduced or exhausted by any of the constituting parts.
Trespassing Bodies: Issue 6, Winter 2017
an online journal of
trespassing art,
science, and philosophy
www.trespassingjournal.com
Trespassing Journal, Issue 6, Winter 2017
While such an analysis of VanderMeer’s text seems to indicate an emergent ecological
framework, I will focus on the porosity of bodies and the diffractive relation between bodies and
thoughts rather than on the relation between parts and wholes. This reading of both VanderMeer’s
text and the material world demands a framework that provides the material world with an activity
and fecundity beyond Descartes’ Res Extensa. As such, I will appeal to Karen Barad’s philosophyphysics,
articulated most clearly in Meeting the Universe Halfway. But the semiotic and textual
intertwining of thoughts and bodies in the Southern Reach Trilogy also requires that thoughts extend
beyond the solipsistic prison of consciousness and exist in the material world. That is, I will argue that
thoughts and agency are distributed across multiple bodies, capable of action not limited by
autonomous units of consciousness separated by an infinite gap of immanence. When the seed of the
tower’s text penetrates the biologists body, the meaning and the thoughts of the tower are
communicated, spewed into the world via materiality. I will also, therefore, appeal to Eduardo Kohn’s
How Forests Think to extend Barad’s philosophy-physics beyond the laboratory and into the semiotic
garden of Area X.
Area X presents dangerous garden, a terroir built on terror that threatens to “bring forth the
seeds of death” to a world covered in projected meaning. But it also presents a possibility for
redistributing agency, for recalibrating ecologies to embrace the porosity of bodies, and for opening
spaces for a distributed material thinking. As such, Area X provides a new grounding for an
environmental ethic where humans, as encased in impermeable bodily penitentiaries, are the
endangered species. The pristine, edenic existence of the material world never invites the
impermeable human, but calls for an intra-action with an embodied, distributed thinking, an embrace
of the terroir and the terror of “the strangling fruit” that will “bring forth the seeds of death to share
with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives”
(VanderMeer, 2014).
Keywords: Cartesian, Jeff VanderMeer, quantum physics, consciousness, biological, semiotics,
porosity

What if our world already ended yesterday? Or, what if it is in the process of ending? Maybe it will not be exactly unexpected, but it will be surprising that it happened under our very noses.

In this essay I explore these somewhat counterintuitive issues. First, the idea that our world is ending. Second, the contention that this thought undermines the assumption that we are one with the world. This exploration forms the basis for conceptualizing a new aesthetics, suited to the predicament of humanity in the early 21st century.

To provide the cornerstones for thinking such an aesthetics, I explore two artistic worlds that deal with the theme of ending, describing the process of falling apart as it unfolds. The examples I use will be somewhat unorthodox, in that they come from a variety of fields: first, the focus on echoes in the work of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov; second, the core premise of the Southern Reach trilogy written by Jeff Vandermeer; third – interwoven throughout, but further explicated in the last section – the sociologist Ulrich Beck’s notion of the metamorphosis of the world.

These examples share a common denominator: they enable listeners, spectators or readers to experience what happens when a world disintegrates, when the coordinates of normality drift apart as the onset of oblivion unfolds. These artistic worlds provide the conceptual and experiential tools for thinking about our current predicament in a world approaching its end. The last part of this essay is an extended meditation on this theme, showing how we may wrestle a new apprehensive aesthetics or expressive regimen from these works.

The chapter reads the Southern Reach trilogy (2014) as a weird Chthulucene narrative (Haraway) that speculatively ‘unthinks’ humans (Hayles) and reads its fantastic materialities and human/nonhuman interrelationalities as a dissemination of a new sense of scientific reality and normality, as explicated in geology, critical philosophy, microbiology, new materialism, quantum physics, and biotechnology/nanotechnology. Estranging us from anthropocentric notions of cognition and nonconscious cognitive capacities, the trilogy provides an imaginative translation of interpenetrating human and nonhuman materialities. I argue that VanderMeer’s narrative style inflicts a nonconscious cognitive mode on readers, undermining epistemological categories and offers a prototype of future storytelling, reflecting entangled content via disruptive, equivocal, and contradictory strange and estranging storytelling, capturing a selective, inchoate, and fleeting knowledge of a diffuse and fluid reality.

The theory of ‘the Other’ serves the role of justification in writing about neo-imperialisms. That is to say, if neo-imperialisms writing is concerned with the colonial expansion of European, American and Japanese powers for the sake of capitalism, then the theory of ‘the Other’ is what enables the expansion. The relevance of such a relationship, where “relevance” can be understood as significance or merit, would be unveiling to the reader the triviality of the concept to begin with. The vast applicability of the theory of ‘the Other’, coupled with its ever-changing subject throughout neo imperalisms writings, undermines its legitimacy. Consequently, Warren Cariou’s short story ‘An Athabasca story’, Evelyn Reilly’s poem ‘A Key to the Families of Thermoplastics’ and Jeff Vandermeer’s novel Annihiliation will be looked at to trace the Other in order to explore its ever-changing nature. This inconsistency of the Other, or shape-shifting, rather, proves to show the concept’s ability to be manipulated and used for self-interest, reinforcing human nature’s selfish tendencies. All three texts make light of this through manipulating the theory within their work; the essay will first elaborate on the theory, and then apply it to Cariou’s to Reilly’s to Vandermeer’s work, in order of growing triviality of the Other.

Hopeful Monsters takes its title from the theory of macro-mutation or large mutations first proposed by German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958). Goldschmidt proposed that mutations occasionally yield individuals within populations that deviate radically from the norm and referred to such individuals as "hopeful monsters". Under the right environmental circumstances, these may become fixed, and the population will found a new species.
Hopeful Monsters was Devasher's sixth solo exhibition and her third solo at Project 88. This project is a speculative journey into different forms of transitional morphology; plant, insect and animal, comprising new videos, prints and drawings.

To borrow a phrase from the science fiction author Jeff Vandermeer, the artist attempts to examine what happens when the natural world becomes a kind of camouflage.

Weird and Eerie Aesthetics of the Anthropocene: The Atmosphere of Fear in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation
This article applies the theoretical framework developed by the British theoretician Mark Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie (2016) on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation (2014). Fisher’s theoretical contribution consists in an analysis of the concepts “the weird” and “the eerie” as specific types of affects that are associated with experiencing fear. According to Fisher’s essays, they are to be found in different artistic forms: literature, music, film and television series. These concepts can be applied to contemporary literature that discusses anthropogenic climate change, known as the Anthropocene fiction or climate fiction. While the weird and the eerie are different types of affects, what they do have in common is a preoccupation with the strange that is manifested in a transgression of the outside to the inside. Fisher points out that eerie scenes are an essential feature of post-apocalyptic literature since it implies descriptions of abandoned structures. Additionally, judging by the contemporary rise of the new weird fiction whose authors are contemporary writers such as Jeff VanderMeer, it is possible to conclude that weird is also inherent to climate change fiction. Since some of VanderMeer’s fiction is associated with climate fiction, the paper analyzes the elements of weird and eerie in his aforementioned novel. Following Fisher’s theoretical framework, the aim of the paper is to propose a contribution to the study of the phenomenon of fear in contemporary climate change fiction.

Marijeta Bradić Čudna i jeziva estetika antropocena: atmosfera straha u Anihilaciji Jeffa VanderMeera U članku se primjenjuju teorijske postavke britanskoga teoretičara Marka Fishera izložene u knjizi The Weird and the Eerie (2016) na pri-mjeru romana Anihilacija (2014) američkoga pisca Jeffa VanderMeera. Fisherov se teorijski doprinos sastoji od raščlambe pojmova čudno (engl. weird) i jezivo (engl. eerie) kao specifičnih vrsta afekata pove-zanih s iskustvom straha, a pronalazi ih u različitim umjetničkim for-mama: književnosti, glazbi, filmovima i televizijskim serijama. Nave-deni su pojmovi primjenjivi na suvremenu književnost koja tematizira antropogene klimatske promjene, takozvanu književnost antropocena ili klimatsku fikciju. Iako je riječ o različitim vrstama afekata, ono što ih ujedinjuje jest preokupacija neobičnim/nepoznatim (engl. strange) koje se očituje u prijestupu izvanjskog u unutrašnje. Fisher ističe kako su jezivi prizori bitna karakteristika postapokaliptične književnosti jer ona podrazumijeva opise napuštenih ruševnih zdanja, a sudeći pre-ma suvremenim pojavama poput takozvane "nove čudne fikcije" (engl. new weird) kod Jeffa VanderMeera, moguće je ustanoviti da je i čudno inherentno književnosti o klimatskim promjenama. Budući da pojedini VanderMeerovi književni tekstovi istodobno pripadaju korpusu knji-ževnosti antropocena, odnosno klimatskoj fikciji, u radu se analiziraju elementi čudnog i jezivog na primjeru njegova teksta. Na temeljima Fisherovih eseja o čudnom i jezivom, cilj je rada ponuditi prilog u pro-učavanju fenomena straha u suvremenoj književnosti koja tematizira antropogene promjene u okolišu.

Observing all of this has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion I had to know everything . . . anything . . . and in its place remains the knowledge that the brightness is not done with me.
Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation, The Southern Reach Trilogy, p. 128

No issue is more critical to contemporary society than the encounter with the other. Yet, whether in nature, culture, politics, or pathology, alterity is too-easily blanketed in banal familiarity. Where can we turn to
return the sublime, the ineffable, and the unspeakable to the encounter?
This gathering will examine such constructs as the uncanny of Freud or Heidegger, Kristeva’s abject, Levinas’s Other, and Miéville’s abcanny to look with fresh wonder—or horror—upon the extraterrestrials, monsters, alien landscapes, and stranded cosmic travelers of weird, horror, speculative, and science fictions.
Our call is for individual papers, symposia, and posters that address the Alien with the 20th and 21st century philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and psychological perspectives of the Psychology &
the Other conference.
The deadline for proposals is February 12th, 2021.
For details on how to submit, please visit us online at
http://PsychologyAndTheOther.com/call-for-proposals

In ihrem Beitrag stellt Christine Lötscher die Assemblage, beispielhaft anhand von Jeff VanderMeers Trilogie Annihilation, als eine dezidiert literaturästhetische Verfahrensform und -technik vor, die zugleich als ein strukturelles Merkmal und wichtigster Bestandteil der New-Weird-Literatur offengelegt wird. Dabei werden außerdem Parallelen und konzeptuelle Spielarten der zwischen Nature Writing und der Weird Fiction changierenden Assemblage behandelt, die sich im weiteren Schritt gegen die längst obsolete Dichotomie zwischen Mensch und Natur wenden.