End-Holocene Realism: The Contemporary Novel between Epochs

End-Holocene Realism presents a theory of the novel in an age of epochal transition. Using the framework of the "end-Holocene," my project turns to contemporary fiction in order to understand what it means, how it feels, and what kinds of characters and worlds emerge under the conditions of waning planetary norms. Reading comparatively across a group of 21st-century novels that inherit and reconstitute Anglo-American novel traditions, I identify how a new age of incalculable risk alters a form that has long centered the regularity of middle-class life. Works by Ben Lerner, Valeria Luiselli, Teju Cole, Jesmyn Ward, Annie Proulx, and others imagine a world characterized by epochal antinomies, oscillating between endings and beginnings, agency and contingency, cumulative loss and latent possibility. Rather than emphasize increasingly frequent and severe disasters, these fictions gather momentum around minor forms of crisis that attach to an experience of the everyday at the onset of a new epoch: the poignancy of last things, the spectral melancholy of photography, the terror of becoming lost in close proximity to home, the buried histories in built environments, and the melancholic enumeration of what is missing or what we stand to lose. 

The novels I analyze are not apocalyptic scenarios of world erasure nor are they science-fiction projections of a revealed future. Instead, I argue that end-Holocene novels reconfigure the codes of realism to produce the present as at once marked by diminished experience and animated with new potential. While novels of the end-Holocene continue to amass the very objects and things that once stood in for a presumed totality in realist fictions, like Flaubert’s barometer or Woolf’s brown stocking, these highly self-aware works present realist details instead as evidence of a disappearing or compromised order of the real. Revising realism on its own terms, these works subvert a sense of the real as a stable or universal category and thus contribute to the necessary work of combatting hegemonic narratives that inform the cultural paradigms responsible for planetary crisis. The terms of such crisis have been taken up in a variety of culturally specific contexts around the globe, but my project focuses on narratives that foreground the destabilizing effects of risk as it enters the domain of historically empowered groups and cultural forms like the literary novel.