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1 results

  • Chapter 3 - Synecdoches of Anthropocene Agency

  • Liliane Campos, Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Institut Universitaire de France
  • Book:
    Entangled Life in Twenty-First-Century Fiction
    Published online:
    23 April 2026
    Print publication:
    07 May 2026, pp 82-109
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  • Summary

    Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.