How the otherworldly worlds created by the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy speak to—and even affect—our own
If ever a moment and a writer were made for each other, that time is now and Jeff VanderMeer is that writer. Reaching more and more readers as his fantastic fiction delves deeper and deeper into the true weirdness of our day, VanderMeer presents a unique opportunity to explore the cultural frictions and fault lines in today’s—and tomorrow’s— literary landscape.
In the first book-length study of this provocative writer, Benjamin J. Robertson focuses on the three major series that have propelled VanderMeer to prominence (his Vennis fictions, Ambergris novels, and Southern Reach Trilogy) as well as his recent stand-alone novel Borne. Most salient for Robertson is how VanderMeer grapples with the transformation of human meaning and being in the contemporary moment. None of This Is Normal reveals how VanderMeer creates fictions that directly address our Anthropocene epoch, in which humanity must reckon with the unprecedented nature of its impact on the environment and with the consequent obsolescence of its methods of representing itself in this altered world.
In Robertson’s reading it becomes startlingly clear that certain fiction, especially when willing to abandon humanist assumptions about history, has the power to not simply show us a world “out there” but to actively participate in that world. As realist fiction and even science fiction conventionally reduce the scale and complexity of the Anthropocene to human-sized dimensions, None of This Is Normal shows how VanderMeer’s work conjures what Robertson calls a “fantastic materiality”: a reality that stands apart from us as a model of thinking, irreducible to our own. 南方三部曲的作者创造了一个超凡脱俗的世界，这个世界是如何与我们自己的某个时刻和一个作家对话甚至影响对方的，那个时刻就是现在，杰夫 · 范德米尔就是那个作家。随着范德米尔的奇幻小说越来越深入地探究我们这个时代的真实怪诞，他的小说吸引了越来越多的读者。范德米尔提供了一个独特的机会，来探索今天和明天文学领域的文化摩擦和断层线。在对这位颇具争议的作家的第一部长篇研究中，本杰明 · j · 罗伯逊(benjamin j. robertson)专注于使范德米尔声名鹊起的三个主要系列(他的凡尼斯小说，龙涎香小说，南部到达三部曲)以及他最近的独立小说《波恩》。对罗伯森来说，最重要的是范德米尔如何处理人类意义的转变，以及如何处理当代的问题。所有这些都不能正常地揭示范德米尔是如何创作出直接针对人类世时代的小说的，在这个时代里，人类必须面对其对环境影响的前所未有的性质，以及随之而来的在这个被改变的世界里表现自己的方法的过时。在罗伯森的阅读中，某些小说变得异常清晰，尤其是当人们愿意放弃关于历史的人道主义假设时，它们不仅能够向我们展示一个“外面”的世界，而且能够积极地参与到那个世界中。作为现实主义小说，甚至科幻小说，通常将人类世的规模和复杂性降低到人类尺度，这些都不正常，这显示了范德米尔的作品是如何召唤出罗伯逊所说的“奇妙的物质性”: 一个与我们不同的现实，作为一个思考的模型，不可还原为我们自己的。 基本信息 出版社 : Univ Of Minnesota Press; 第 1st 版 (2018年11月13日) 语言 : 英语 精装 : 208页 ISBN-10 : 1517902924 ISBN-13 : 978-1517902926 商品重量 : 386 g 尺寸 : 13.97 x 2.29 x 21.59 cm
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