New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory

• Shows how new realism reshapes humanistic inquiry in the age of climate change
• Contributes to the rehabilitation and reframing of realism after postmodernism
• Introduces a new contextual and ecological realism that reconnects the human cultural world with non-humans and the environment

What is the singular reality of humanistic objects of study? By pairing post-apocalyptic novels by Margaret Atwood, José Saramago, Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy with new realist theories, Monika Kaup shows that, just as new realist theory can illuminate post-apocalyptic literature, post-apocalyptic literature also embeds new theories of the real.

Kaup showcases a context-based concept of the real, arguing that new realisms of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks and ecologies, rather than old realisms of isolated parts and things, represent the most promising escape from the impasses of constructivism and positivism.

To achieve this, Kaup brings together contemporary theories that formulate context-based realisms:

• Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory
• Chilean neurophenomenologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s theories of autopoiesis and enactivism
• German philosopher Markus Gabriel’s new ontology of fields of sense
• French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness
• American philosopher Alphonso Lingis’s phenomenology of passionate identification