Year of Award
2022
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
Master of Arts (MA)
Degree Name
English (Literature)
Other Degree Name/Area of Focus
Ecocriticism
Department or School/College
Department of English
Committee Chair
Louise Economides
Commitee Members
Louise Economides, Katie Kane, Christopher Preston
Keywords
science fiction, grief, anthropocentrism, comedy, horror, attunement
Subject Categories
American Literature | Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America
Abstract
This thesis examines the narrative portrayals of issues pertaining to anthropogenic extinction in two contemporary speculative fiction novels: Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021) and James Bradley’s Ghost Species (2020). This focus leads to consideration of narrative genre, tropes, and affective resonance. The first half of this thesis centers the genres of tragedy and elegy, their tropes of ghosts and hauntings, and the affective processes of grief and horror. Within these narrative frameworks extinction is experienced as a claustrophobic site of horror in Hummingbird Salamander, and as a time-warping inspiration of grief in Ghost Species. However, in each novel these genres of experience permeate one another, suggesting that grief and horror, tragedy and elegy are intertwined. The latter half of this thesis builds on this permeability to trace how tragedy and elegy can bleed into comedy, grief and horror can morph into hope, and ghosts and hauntings – reminders of loss – can be reconceived as kin and contaminants which affirm presence and connection. Ultimately, I suggest that VanderMeer and Bradley each accomplish the novel usage of kinship and contamination as comedic tropes through which to narrate localized, embodied experiences of the sixth extinction that trigger hope, in juxtaposition with the relatively well-worn usage of elegiac and tragic tropes of ghosts and hauntings to narrate the grief and horror with which anthropogenic extinction is generally met.
Recommended Citation
Nicholson, Christopher Hardesty, "Ghosts, Hauntings, Kinship, and Contamination: Key Tropes for Narrating Extinction in Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander and James Bradley's Ghost Species" (2022). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 11891.
https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11891
Included in
American Literature Commons, Literature in English, Anglophone outside British Isles and North America Commons
© Copyright 2022 Christopher Hardesty Nicholson