Toward a Speculative-Pragmatic Sublime: A Narratological Analysis of the Toxic Sublime and the Unnarrated in Contemporary U.S. Literature

David Lombard

doi:10.25038/am.v0i23.401

Authors

David Lombard

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i23.401

Keywords:

speculative, pragmatism, sublime, toxicity, Anthropocene, American literature, narratology, ecocriticism

Abstract

This paper provides a close narratological and comparative analysis of Rachel Carson’s short story “A Fable for Tomorrow” (1962) and Susanne Antonetta’s memoir Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001), which both highlight the pragmatic and ecocritical potential of literature as a source of cultural responses to the Anthropocene challenge. Engaging in a critical dialogue with Brian Massumi’s concept of speculative pragmatism as presented in his Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts (2011) and, more precisely, its aesthetic-political approach, the literary readings in this article build on other notions such as the unnarrated and the toxic sublime which complicate and enrich the literary discourse on environmental disruption. The literary works of environmental (non)fiction studied offer examples of how literature negotiates the (in)visibility, (un)representability, and (non)narratability of forms of environmental pollution through the use of the trope of the sublime as well as of olfactory and gustatory perception while they both portray the authors’ evident rhetorical intention to foster ecological awareness and responsibility.

Article received: April 23, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper

Author Biography

David Lombard

David Lombard
F.R.S.-FNRS/Universities of Liège and Leuven, Belgium
France

David Lombard (1993) studied Anglophone and Hispanic cultures and literatures at the University of Liège (Belgium) and received his master's degrees in 2016 and 2017 (philology and didactics). Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Interdisciplinary Center of Applied Poetics (CIPA) and a lecturer in English at the Institut Supérieur des Langues Vivantes (ISLV) of the University of Liège, his main fields of interests are American literary studies, ecocriticism, environmental humanities, rhetoric, and narrative theory. His most recent publications include a monograph (Techno-Thoreau: Aesthetics, Ecology and the Capitalocene [Macerata: Quodlibet, 2019]) and an article (“Thoreau and the Capitalocene”, Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, vol. 4, no. 2, December 2018) of ecocriticism on Henry David Thoreau's literary legacy and he is also carrying out a Ph.D. research project consisting in a comprehensive rhetorical and narratological analysis of the sublime in a delimited corpus of contemporary U.S. fiction and nonfiction.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i23.401 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i23.401