In conclusion, I want to depart a bit from my method in the rest of this book and focus on mimetic representation of technology that frames images of the view from above. While the form of environment is articulated by aerial description in similar ways as the modernist technique starting from Cather – through the aesthetics of extent, vertical imagination and unnarrated scales – the articulation differs in contemporary literature through explicit reflexive interest in the individual in relation to the view from above. Anxiety following the assertive determinacy of digital technology has motivated this reflexive turn.

The collision of the form of environment and the form of the text, as I have shown, takes place as a negation of the culture of perceptual realities in which the text is embedded. I have shown how this progressed in the twentieth century in the previous three chapters with the grid form and conceptual reductions stemming from first flight, the alienation of Western travellers in an increasingly visible non-Western world, and the sudden omnipresence of ‘whole-Earth’ images. But the theoretical orientation toward the form of environment in aerial description set out in Chapter 1 shows how my readings of fiction from Cather, Bowles and DeLillo open up new ways of interpreting this technological anxiety. Rather than products of their respective historical perceptual contexts, I have read these texts as primarily engaged with the environment through which the reader can encounter the ways it structures stories and our experiences of them.

The literary work of art is an aesthetic object that always functions as an articulation of the environment it re-implaces. I have shown in both theory and analysis how my redefinition of art and environment is apparent at the edges of criticism and fiction. By using the term ‘nonanthropocentric’ throughout this book, I have foregrounded how the literary object is constructed as a nonhuman artefact rendered using the tools humans have available. In the face of the technological progress that is the background of this book, I think that this reversal to nonanthropocentric perspectives is a challenge that we must face in order to effect change through the practice of reading and writing.