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Article dans une revue Ecozon@ Année : 2023

Contemporary Collapse: New Narratives of the End.

Christophe Premat
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Sara Bédard-Goulet

Résumé

The apocalyptic genre in Western art is rooted in a long tradition, largely influenced by religious perspectives on the end of the world, with works that highlight the struggle to imagine a world without humans, so that they often depict a never-ending end or a post-apocalyptic world (Gervais). With the increasing acknowledgement of the current ecological crisis, the pervasive awareness of its anthropogenic origin and the human inability to react appropriately to stop or reverse its process, the apocalypse and its representations take a new turn, one that questions the human’s relevance on the planet. Contemporary narratives of the end thus need to deal with the perspective of a posthuman world, which has already attracted the attention of scholars for the past decades (Braidotti). Such works offer speculative frames through which to defamiliarize and reorganize the human standpoint on the end, address her/his relationship towards the environment and point out connected realities such as species extinction. Through this reconsidering of the human at the end, contemporary narratives tackle a number of important issues such as the relationship with the Other, whether as individuals, families, communities or species. In this issue of Ecozon@, these considerations are examined through aesthetic and narrative choices that embody various possible endings, there by presenting survivalist struggles, renewal hopes, singular or collective voices, stories in/of ruins, interspecies care, soft and hard versions of the apocalypse, and so forth. This special issue takes seriously the idea that “global climate change is [...] catastrophic for the human imaginary” (Colebrook 10) and focuses on contemporary narratives that nevertheless seek to imagine the end of the world. It includes articles that explore how these narratives question the significance of the human in a collapsing world, how this resonates with current issues in ecocriticism and the environmental humanities and allows for an articulation of environmental scholarship with the contributions of collapse and apocalypse studies. The contributions to this special issue investigate a posthuman aesthetics in contemporary literature, which builds on,but mostly shifts Western and anthropocentric conceptions of collapse, and diverges from the apocalyptic tradition. In that sense, this special topic considers the posthumus along with the posthuman, to think about what happens after death, where the posthumus renegotiates the assemblage of chains of life between animals, plants and humans (Derrida 285). The issue also includes essays that engage with ethical concerns of apocalyptic narratives, as well as with their epistemological implications, where the presence or absence of human and nonhuman traces determines a specific knowledge and way of knowing in a collapsing world.
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halshs-04464287, version 1 (18-02-2024)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - CC BY 4.0

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Christophe Premat, Sara Bédard-Goulet. Contemporary Collapse: New Narratives of the End.: An Introduction. Ecozon@, 2023, 14 (2), https://ecozona.eu/article/view/5252/5686. ⟨10.37536/ECOZONA.2023.14.2.5252⟩. ⟨halshs-04464287⟩
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