Francesca Balestro
(UCL) -
2024-25 Students
francesca.balestro.22@ucl.ac.uk
Everyday Anthropocene Life Narratives: Conflicting Scales, Affects, and Form in the Contemporary Novel
| When asking “What is an individual life?”, author Daisy Hildyard (2017, 101) illuminates the challenge of narrating an individual life that is profoundly entangled with larger social and ecological phenomena. My research explores the extent to which 21st-century novels written in English, Italian, and French negotiate individual life narratives with the massive scales disclosed by the Anthropocene, raising questions such as: To what extent do contemporary novels narrate individual lives while acknowledging larger scales of phenomena? What role do affects play in the negotiation between conflicting scales within the novels? Do individual and planetary scales mutually exclude each other? Can large-scale phenomena be represented through individual life stories, and if so, what narrative techniques do these texts employ? In exploring these questions, my research argues that 21st-century novels engage with the dissemination of the Anthropocene not only through genre fiction, but also through an emphasis on affects, everyday practices, and formal experimentalism. My overarching research objective is to highlight how these novels reposition individual lives amidst planetary scales, offering new ways to engage, cope with, and react to the impending scenarios of individual irrelevance. In mapping and analysing this genre I call “everyday Anthropocene life narratives”, my project breaks new ground for the scholarship of the Anthropocene. It considers a broader range of texts beyond the overstudied corpus of genre fiction (sci-fi, dystopian, apocalyptic fiction), including several subgenres (autofiction, memoir, life-writing narratives) not yet included in an Anthropocene context. It prioritises a focus on conflicting scales over an excessive emphasis on large scales, and it overcomes the Anglophone bias of existing research through the analysis of a multilingual corpus of novels. Primary Supervisor: Prof Hans Demeyer |