The Imaginative Challenges of the Anthropocenes: A Rhetorical and Narratological Analysis of the Sublime in Contemporary U.S. Literature

In this paper, the sublime is used as the critical lens through which I conduct a rhetorical and narratological analysis of a series of contemporary U.S. literary texts. More specifically, with the aim of exploring new ways of analyzing environmental disruption or “wounds”, this paper examines the limits and affordances of using the “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011), a redefinition of the notion of the sublime which emphasizes the tensions between appreciating awe-inspiring materialities and recognizing their toxic and life-threatening potential, but also other recent reappropriations of the sublime and approaches such as speculative pragmatism (Massumi 2011), in the study of literature and culture. Special attention is given to contemporary works such as Rachel Carson’s short story “A Fable for Tomorrow” (1962), Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), Susanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (2001) and Maureen McHugh’s short story collection After the Apocalypse (2011), which revisit in various but related ways the relationship humans maintain with the nonhuman and with natural resources in the context of radical environmental change. Such analysis highlights new imaginative methods of representing materialities in the world we inhabit while providing cultural responses to the concepts of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.