Mark Bould: The Anthropocene Unconscious
Climate Catastrophe Culture
Today’s movies, television, and novels are pregnant with catastrophe, with extreme weather and rising waters, with environmental wildness and climate weirdness. From the novel Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, the Anthropocene is to be found bubbling away everywhere. It has become, Mark Bould argues, the central subject of our collective unconscious.
The Anthropocene Unconscious explores a world of fictions that are not directly concerned with climate change but yet cannot escape its gravitational pull. This playful and riveting book roams through literary fiction and arthouse cinema, through comic books about vegetable superheroes and cable movies featuring flying sharks, ranging across genres with an utter disregard for distinctions between high and low culture.
In sum, Bould poses a frightening question: What if all the stories we tell today are fundamentally about climate change?
