The New Cultural Geology

Literary Proto‐Humans

“…In an article on the difficulty of reconciling the evolution of life on Earth with narrative representation, Porter Abbott writes that ‘there is no unencumbered way of packaging [Darwin's theory of natural selection] in narrative form without serious distortion’ (Abbott , 144). Abbott's conclusion points to the radical challenges to narrative and literary practices raised – as noted by McGurl (, ) – by phenomena that go beyond the ‘human scale’ of everyday experience: phenomena that take place over millions or even billions of years and feature no distinct anthropomorphic agency or teleology. But fiction, and particularly fiction of the literary variety, has other strategies for coming to terms with the ‘deep’ history of humankind than direct representation.…”

“…In two seminal articles, Mark McGurl (, ) calls attention to the uneasy tension between literature and the ‘big scale’ of evolutionary, geological or cosmic phenomena. Literature, a human practice with barely 3,000 years of recorded history, looks quite small in front of the millions of years over which life on Earth evolved.…”

Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable

“…Mark McGurl (2012: 533–553) might agree, describing this kind of terrestrializing hermeneutics as a dialectics of expansion and contraction. Rendering the Anthropocene culturally meaningful, this dialectical approach recognizes the ways that culture is simultaneously grounded and ungrounded by the geological: the remaindered, latent meaning, always anterior and posterior to moments of cultural production and reception (McGurl, 2011: 381). In their debates over the transnational and transtemporal capacities of American literature to reach back, intertextually, to the deep time of the planet (and, by implication, forward to its protensive futures), McGurl (2012, 2013) and Wai Chee Dimock (2013) register a variously qualified appreciation of genre fiction (especially science fiction) for its posthumanist representational potential.…”

The Contemporary

“…The non or post‐human, as Richard Grusin explains, is “understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies” (, p. vii) . Scholarly interest in environment and affect has already begun to demarcate the contemporary or, as Mark McGurl argues, to demarcate the “exomodern,” the “long now” that seems to lie outside the “residual humanism” of the modern vs. postmodern divide (, p. 380–1). It might seem that post‐humanism is related to the post‐critical project insofar as both seek to rethink traditional hierarchies and modes of apprehending the world.…”