'Life Writing in the Anthropocene is a collection of timely and original approaches to the question of what constitutes a life, how that life is narrated, and what lives matter in autobiography studies in the Anthropocene. This era is characterised by the geoengineering impact of humans, which is shaping the planet’s biophysical systems through the combustion of fossil fuels, production of carbon, unprecedented population growth, and mass extinction. These developments threaten the rights of humans and other-than-humans to just and sustainable lives.
'In exploring ways of representing life in the Anthropocene, this work articulates innovative literary forms such as ecobiography (the representation of a human subject's entwinement with their environment), phytography (writing the lives of plants), and ethological poetics (the study of nonhuman poetic forms), providing scholars and writers with innovative tools to think and write about our strange new world. In particular, its recognition on plant life reminds us of how human lives are entwined with vegetal lives. The creative and critical essays in this book, shaped by a number of Antipodean authors, bear witness to a multitude of lives and deaths.
'The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.' (Publication summary)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Life: Writing and Rights in the Anthropocene
Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock
The Process
1. From the Miniature to the Momentous: Writing Lives through Ecobiography
Jessica White
2. Period Rhetoric, Countersignature, and the Australian Novel
Thomas Bristow
3. Writing Toward and With: Ethological Poetics and Nonhuman Lives
Stuart Cooke
4. Becoming D | other: Life as a Transmuting Device
Astrid Joutseno
Essays
5. Writing the Lives of Plants: Phytography and the Botanical Imagination
John Charles Ryan
6. "If a Tree Falls …" : Posthuman Testimony in C. D. Wright’s Casting Deep Shade,
Eamonn Connor
7. Writing the Lives of Fungi at the End of the World
Alexis Harley
8. Planetary Delta: Anthropocene Lives in the Blues Memoir
Parker Krieg
9. Memoir and the End of the Natural World
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth
10. "As Closely Bonded as We are:" Animalographies, Kinship, and Conflict in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy
Grace Moore
Forum: Writing the Lives of Other-than-Humans
11. "Desperation for Life": Writing Death in the Anthropocene
Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock
Forums
12. Writing the Cow: Poetry, Activism, and the Texts of Meat
Jessica Holmes
13. Sheep: Voice | Complicity | Precedent
Barbara Holloway
14. A Triumphal Entry, a Stifled Cry, a Hushed Retreat
Rick De Vos
What’s Next?
15. Her Biography: Deborah Bird Rose
Stephen Muecke
Artist’s Statement
16. Artist’s Statement
Anna Laurent
