The paradox of imagining the post-human world

Abstract

AbstractSince the beginning of the twenty-first century, works depicting a post-human world have become a popular non-fiction genre. This kind ofdisanthropyis an extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. In this article, I examine one such disanthropic narrative, Alan Weisman’s bestselling non-fiction bookThe World Without Us(2007), using the theoretical framework of narrative fictionality studies.The World Without Usfalls between the conventional oppositional pairing of factual and fictional narratives. The book bases its rhetoric heavily on scientific facts – or at least on scientific expectations – especially in its use of interviews with scientists. Nevertheless, the core idea of a world without humans is inevitably fictional since the presence of readers makes the book’s premise manifestly counterfactual and paradoxical. In my analysis, I adopt a rhetorical approach to fictionality and factuality to ask how particular techniques and strategies connected to fictionality and factuality are employed in Weisman’s text in order to discuss the anxieties, desires, hopes, and fears of the possibility of human extinction.