Jeff VanderMeer, or the Novel Trapped in the Open World

Clapp, Jeffrey Michael

doi:10.1080/00111619.2020.1816890

Cited by 2 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…I am not the first scholar to suggest that contemporary literature is paying increasing attention to video games. In a reading of works by Jeff VanderMeer-a well-known contemporary author of speculative fiction in the "weird" mode-Jeffrey Clapp (2020) argues that VanderMeer's novels echo the aesthetics of open-world games. 5 Focusing on VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy (2014) as well as Borne (2017) and Dead Astronauts (2017), Clapp suggests that VanderMeer's works reject the plot-driven logic of mainstream fiction (including speculative fiction).…”

Section: Literary Form and The Ideology Of Gaming: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In some instances, the loop involves verbal repetition. For example, Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (one of the works examined by Clapp; see Clapp, 2020) features a chapter that consists entirely of iterations of the two sentences "They killed me. They brought me back" (2019, p. 189), spoken by a nonhuman animal (a fox).…”

Section: Loop-like Structures and Simulation Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, they borrow from open-world games an emphasis on spatial structures, and particularly on puzzling or counterintuitive spatiality such as the underground “tower” that plays a central role in Annihilation , the first of the “Southern Reach” novels. Open-world games leave it up to the player to work out a narrative by following a network of quests and missions that are spatially distributed—a version of what Jenkins (2004, p. 123) famously called “environmental storytelling.” Similarly, for Clapp, “in Southern Reach, spatial orientation replaces narrative development as the driver of the representational form” (2021, p. 420). Although this reading arguably underestimates the relative linearity of storytelling in, especially, VanderMeer’s earlier novels, it does begin to suggest how contemporary fiction may lift from games not just in thematic terms (digital technology is not a central concern in VanderMeer’s oeuvre) but also on the level of narrative form.…”

Section: Literary Form and The Ideology Of Gaming: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Undoubtedly, there is a growing body of literary scholarship that already engages in this type of interpretation (including Jeffrey Clapp's [2020] article, discussed below). My goal here is to highlight the opportunities afforded by this approach more explicitly than has been done so far.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…My own close readings in what follows help exemplify this claim about the potential of a video game-inspired approach to literary interpretation, and how literary criticism may be enhanced by game studies concepts. Undoubtedly, there is a growing body of literary scholarship that already engages in this type of interpretation (including Clapp's [2021] article, discussed below). My goal here is to highlight the opportunities afforded by this approach more explicitly than has been done so far.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer

Caracciolo

2022

Games and Culture

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Game scholars have discussed both the ways in which video games structurally differ from literary fiction and the ways in which they remediate motifs and narrative strategies from it. In this article, I reverse the direction of that exchange, arguing that video games are disclosing new perspectives on both literary writing and literary interpretation. My focus is on how literature can integrate ludic strategies on a formal level, rather than by merely thematizing games (as genre fiction does extensively). I thus discuss three formal devices—multimodality, present-tense narration, and loop-like repetitions—that evince considerable literary interest in gaming culture. Through these formal experimentations, literature participates in a media environment that is significantly shaped by games. I argue that this intermedial transfer also offers an opportunity for a literary scholarship to enrich its conceptual and interpretive toolbox through dialogue with both game studies and gaming culture.

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Section: Literary Form and The Ideology Of Gaming: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Loop-like Structures and Simulation Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literary Form and The Ideology Of Gaming: Existing Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer

Caracciolo

2022

Games and Culture

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“I Am Not Returning Home”: A Transgender Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

Nash

2021

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

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Jeff VanderMeer's novel Annihilation (2014) takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as "the biologist." It follows an expedition of four women into Area X, where monstrous creatures roam and all living things, including the biologist, undergo transitions as their DNA radically changes. This reading of the biologist's journal presents it as not only a transition narrative but as a fictional transgender autobiography, sharing many similarities with the features of trans autobiography identified by Jay Prosser (1998). I argue that the biologist's attempts to assert her identification of a topographical anomaly as the "tower" can be a metaphor for the struggle in trans autobiography for self-identification to be accepted as truth. Contextualizing Annihilation within current discourses in transecology, I make links to the rhetoric of blame on LGBTQIA+ people as the cause of environmental disasters. I conclude with a hopeful reading, which defies this blame, of the biologist's statement that "I am not returning home," as an ending of trans possibility. Trans people must constantly reassert and fight for our existence, so as a trans-identified scholar I hope to highlight transgender readings in unexpected places, showing that our experiences exist across all genres." . . . I have hoped that in reading this account, you might find me a credible, objective witness." (Jeff VanderMeer 2014a, 55) Annihilation(2014a) by Jeff VanderMeer is a weird fiction novel which follows an expedition of four women into Area X, a site quarantined by the agency known as the Southern Reach and investigated for many years due to unusual changes in its ecology. VanderMeer's writing is often seen as a response to climate change and Anthropocene concerns (Bruhn and Hart 1), and is categorized as both weird fiction and ecofiction (Marshall 663 cited in Clapp 2). Weird fiction typically blends sci-fi, fantasy, and horror with aspects of surrealism, magical realism and Lovecraftian influences (Vint 197 cited in Ersoy 252). It has been argued that Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space (1927) could be seen as the precursor to Annihilation (Ersoy 253). As Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer (2011) describe in The Weird: A Compendium of Weird and Dark Stories, the weird: " . . . strives for a kind of understanding even when something cannot be understood, and acknowledges that failure as sign and symbol of our limitations" (Location 250). Stories belonging to the genre of weird fiction do not have to concern themselves only with the extra-terrestrial and can just as easily be concerned with life on Earth and contemporary human and ecological issues (Ersoy 253).Annihilation, the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy, takes the form of a field journal written by a character known as "the biologist." Names are never used on the expedition, and we know the rest of the team only as the psychologist (the expedition leader), the surveyor, the anthropologist, and the (absent) linguist. Within Area X two structures, a topographical anom...

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Jeff VanderMeer, or the Novel Trapped in the Open World

Cited by 2 publications

References 12 publications

Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer

Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer

“I Am Not Returning Home”: A Transgender Reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation

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