Editor’s Note

Abstract

We are excited to announce that ISLE 29.4 is almost a double issue. The volume opens with Rebecca S. Oh’s “Apocalyptic Realism: ‘A New Category of the Event,’” which examines how “apocalyptic realism both traces the ways in which world-ending closures are historically produced and the ways in which worlding goes on from within imposed forms of futurelessness.” Oh’s article “considers Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People as an example of apocalyptic realism.” Then, Swaralipi Nandi, in “Speculating the Carbon Rift: Capitalistic Dystopias and the Ecological-Noir in ‘Carbon,’” “analyze[s] Maitrey Bajpai and Ramiz Ilham Khan’s short film Carbon (2017) as a fictional resistance to the cultural amnesia of climate change.” Nandi also explores “the unsuitability of literary realism as a mode for the representation of climate change and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a narrative vehicle to convey the vagaries of a future thriving on present fossil capitalism.” Angelo Monaco’s article “Archives of Environmental Apocalypse in Sarah Moss’s Cold Earth: Archaeology, Viruses and Melancholia” focuses on how Moss’s novel Cold Earth (2009), which is set in the Arctic, is “concerned with the dread of obliteration and the yearning for recovering time” and how “archaeological excavation, environmental apocalypse, temporal disarray, and memory frictions function as archiving vehicles.” Staying in the polar regions, in “The Silent Continent? Textual Responses to the Soundscapes of Antarctica,” Carolyn Philpott and Elizabeth Leane study “the soundscapes of Antarctica—especially its silence—and their role in human experiences of the continent, as captured in written narratives from the ‘Heroic Era’ (1895–1922), when the continent was first explored on foot, to the present day” in order “to draw greater attention to the role of the sonic in human engagements with Antarctica and to the importance of written texts in capturing the essence and meaning of these experiences.”