Sublime Extinctions in Anthropocene Fiction: Literary representations of geologic force in works by Ballard, McCarthy and Watkins

Abstract: This essay examines representations of extinction in a selection of Anthropocene fiction. The Anthropocene is a potential new geological epoch, in which the human species capacity for massive ecological transformation is rivalling that of geologic processes. As the Anthropocene has grown into a subject of cultural significance, critical literary scholarship has identified implications for a possible Anthropocene fiction. A representational challenge in this regard is how to render extinction comprehensible in literature. This essay examines how extinction is manifested as a representational problem for literature in three fictional works. It explores scale, threshold and continuity in J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962); archive, absence and futurity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); and speculation, desire and the rhetorical device of catalog in Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015). I argue that these representational limits are explicable through the concept of the sublime, which in the Anthropocene occurs in response to significantly different relational terms to the nonhuman other.