New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup Brent Ryan Bellamy Against the Linguistic Turn, Against New and Old Materialism, Ontology Now and Forever! Monika Kaup. New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory. Edinburgh UP, 2021. 346 pp. $29.95 pk & ebk, $130 hc. Monika Kaup's New Ecological Realisms builds on philosopher Markus Gabriel's claim that new realism is a periodizing term for what comes after postmodernity (196). Kaup launches an assault on the linguistic turn and offers admission to an exhibit on the "rehabilitation of ontology," conveying renewed interest in philosophical realism. Well worth the price of admission, Kaup's study provides a clarifying overview of the thinkers, their views, and their relationships, including but not limited to Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Kaup assembles four new realist theories to elaborate "realisms of organised wholes" (5) across her chapters: Bruno Latour's political ecology, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's autopoietic theory, Markus Gabriel's ontology of fields of sense, and Jean-Luc Marion's and Alphonso Lingis's return to phenomenology in the wake of poststructuralism. The book proceeds by way of comparative study to explore the suggestion that "grasping reality" requires "mapping worlds and exploring contexts" rather than "making a collection of everything that there is" (5). Kaup selects Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy (2003-2013), José Saramago's Blindness (1995), Octavia E. Butler's Parable books (1993-1998), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) precisely for their specific deployment of post-apocalyptic narrative. New Ecological Realisms argues that post-apocalyptic novels are a singular art form that reformulates how apocalyptic narrative works. Kaup relies on Derek Attridge's affirmation of the singularity of the literary artwork. Kaup writes, "Apocalyptic thinking is inherently ontological: it is about the world as a whole" (6). Moreover, she highlights the inevitability of narrative's drive to a specific predetermined end: "Its overt orientation towards an overall purposive design makes apocalypse the epitome of narrative as such" (57). In the case of Kaup's chapters, the novels discussed each envision "new collectives" that set aside "competition and domination" for "cooperation and ecology": "a trans-species ecological collective of human survivors and artificial species (Atwood); an organised society of the blind (Saramago); a post-apocalyptic religion built on loss and uprootedness (Butler); and a postapocalyptic self founded on passionate commitment (McCarthy)" (78). This is not a book about sf, although it will be of interest to some sf critics. Kaup relies on Darko Suvin's formulation of cognitive estrangement and holds with a distinction between serious sf and futuristic fairy tales. Colson Whitehead's Zone One offers an example of the latter, as Kaup claims that "the fantastic device of a zombie apocalypse serves as a means to evoke horror and serial combat of the action-adventure type rather than the critical [End Page 568] extrapolation of real-world trends" (65). American studies scholar Priscilla Wald's work on outbreak narratives appears in the book (176), as does Tom Moylan's concept of the critical utopia (222-23). Given Kaup's critique of the linguistic turn, it is no wonder that Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren (1974) is avoided here for its arch-postmodern inflections (despite its inarguable status as a singular text!), yet as Jessica Hurley reminds us in Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (2020), Delany spent time in narratologist and fellow linguistic-turn traveler Frank Kermode's office writing Dhalgren. Kermode makes an appearance here as well, specifically for Kaup's theorization of postapocalyptic time. Though justified by Kaup's logic and methods, such selections remind me of film-studies scholar Rick Altman's observation of film genre writing: scholars can define genre precisely by how they select examples and which texts constitute edge cases. On my read, Kaup's decision about what information can count as meaningful given the discussion is discerning at best and idiosyncratic at worst. For instance, much care is given to narrate the intellectual history of Bruno Latour's oeuvre, yet Fredric Jameson, whose work presents serious challenges from a Marxist standpoint to the...