Liliane Campos argues that contemporary fiction is shaping a new, multi-scalar view of life.
Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Multi-scalar Poetics
In the early twenty-first century, humans face complex relations of dependency with the invisibly small and the ungraspably huge, from the viral to the planetary. Entangled Life examines how anglophone fiction imagines this ecological interdependence. It outlines an emergent poetics across a range of genres, including realist fiction, science fiction, weird fiction, and dystopian fiction. Arguing that literary form performs epistemic and ethical work, Campos analyses the rhetorical strategies through which these stories connect human and nonhuman scales. She shows that fiction uses three recurrent devices – critical synecdoche, ontological metalepsis, and scalar irony – to shape our awareness of other scales and forms of life, and our response-ability towards them.
This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Liliane Campos is a lecturer in English studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a Fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of The Dialogue of Art and Science in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (2011) and Sciences en Scène (2012), and a co-editor of Life, Re-Scaled: The Biological Imagination in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Performance (2022).