Mutant Narratives in Ecological Science Fiction: Thinking with Embodied Estrangement

by Kaisa Kortekallio

Overview

Using an innovative multidisciplinary approach which is deeply invested in posthumanist thought, this book demonstrates how reading science fiction shapes the way we engage with lived environments. In dialogue with works by widely studied science fiction authors Greg Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer, it draws out how they function as mutant narratives. The first to systematically integrate three fields – feminist posthumanism, cognitive narratology, and science fiction studies – it offers a complex and coherent understanding of readerly experience as material, embodied, dynamic, and imaginative.

Covering a range of urgent topics, including climate fiction, New Weird fiction, and new phenomenologies of the body, this book is the first to demonstrate how readerly experience acts as a site for ethical and political reorientation in the time of climate change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350296787
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	11/16/2023
Series:	Posthumanism in Practice
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	690 KB

About the Author

Kaisa Kortekallio is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Turku Institute for Advanced Sciences, University of Turku, Finland. She has published on contemporary ecological speculative fiction, New Weird fiction, more-than-human subjectivity, and narrative experientiality.
Kaisa Kortekallio is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, affiliated with the research consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–2022). She has published on contemporary ecological speculative fiction, New Weird fiction, more-than-human subjectivity, and narrative experientiality.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Literary Studies in the Anthropocene
1 More-than-Human Reading and Experiential Change
2 Mutant Figures and Reading Bodies
3 Readerly Choreographies
4 Embodied Estrangement and Jeff VanderMeer's The Southern Reach
Conclusion
Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Kaisa Kortekallio's book develops an innovative blend of posthumanism, narrative theory, and enactivist philosophy. Kortekallio's prose foregrounds choreographic metaphors, and that's no coincidence: the moves contained in her readings of "mutant narratives" offer unique affective training for reimagining the human in times of ecological crisis” —Marco Caracciolo, Associate Professor of English & Literary Theory, Ghent University

“What are eco-narratives for? Mutant Narratives develops the best case we have for literature's power to attune readers' minds and bodies to the unsettling realities of the Anthropocene. Interweaving virtuoso close readings and bold theorizing, its argument that the experience of literature trains us for posthuman life is as brilliant as it is urgent.” —Pieter Vermeulen, Associate Professor of American & Comparative Literature, University of Leuven

From the Publisher