Chronotopes of Extinction
Description
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the novelistic chronotope emerges from simple observation: that our experience of time is always spatial, and that the novel, as a representative and narrative form, is a vehicle of such spatialization. But Bakhtin’s idea also implies a plurality of chronotopes available to the novel – the road, the provincial town, the salon, the threshold – each of which posits a distinct conception of space and time and a different kind of subject. Franco Moretti puts it illuminatingly: “What happens depends on where it happens ... It could be the slogan of Bakhtin’s chronotope."
This panel asks: how do these principles of multiplicity and contingent meaning fare when confronted with the mother of all events: species extinction? If chronotopes reflect how humans inhabit and make sense of the world, what becomes of this structure when time is spatialized in terms of simple scarcity, and when the subject in question is constructed precisely by its pending disappearance?
In Planetary Longings (2022), Mary Louise Pratt considers the Anthropocene as just one of several possible chronotopes specific to the age of climate change. Central to her discussion is a sense of the concept’s “fatal limitation”: that it leaves “the anthropo- in its place.” The Anthropocene chronotope, she argues, “offers mainly a story, a structure of desire, whereby humankind undertakes to redeem itself by acting on nature in different ways than it has in the past, thus rescuing both nature and itself.” For Pratt, that story depends on, and reiterates, the notions of agency and mutuality implied in the model of “man acting on nature.”
Following Pratt’s analysis, we invite papers that address the viability and potential for a continuing plurality of chronotopic formations in the face of imminent species extinction. The central questions to be addressed include the following: can the spatiotemporal architecture of the novel survive the age of climate catastrophe, and if so, how? Does climate change spell the consolidation of all prior chronotopes into a single, inescapable one shaped by the calamity of extinction, or can literature still sustain multiple chronotopic possibilities, even within narratives of ecological collapse? How do the chronotopes of climate extinction, and the subjects they construct, compare to earlier narrative responses to world-ending events, such as the biblical deluge or nuclear apocalypse?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Josh Todarello is Visiting Assistant Professor in German at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on the aesthetics and political economy, comparative literature, the novel, and postcolonial studies. A monograph, Literary and Economic Form in the German and Austrian Novel: Capital, Class, and Totality from Mann to Brecht, is to be published in 2026. Other work has appeared in Monatshefte, Modern Language Notes, and Asymptote.
Speaker Bio
Maya Hollander is a DPhil candidate in English at Exeter College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the reception of the Genesis creation narrative in contemporary post-apocalyptic American fiction.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Chrulew is Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University and editor of the Edinburgh University Press book series, Animalities. He has co-edited numerous books and journal issues on philosophical ethology, extinction studies, multispecies ethnography, and field philosophy, and has published extensively on the history and philosophy of animal sciences. His recent essays can be found in Theory, Culture & Society and Environmental Humanities, and his short fiction in Westerly and Plutonics.
Speaker Bio
Antoine Traisnel is Departmental Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Oxford. He
is author of Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (2020);
Donner le change: L’impensé animal (2016), with Thangam Ravindranathan; and Hawthorne:
Blasted Allegories (2015). He is completing a manuscript titled Futureproof: The Biopolitics of
Climate Survival, on the literary and technological imaginaries surrounding mass extinction.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Oliver Aas (pronounced Haas) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and his research explores existential problems posed by everyday life, with a focus on environmental questions in Anglophone, Slavic/Soviet, and Scandinavian literary and visual cultures. His current book project, Arctic Forms: Literature, Art, Politics, examines the melting Arctic as both a material reality and a cultural figure.
Speaker Bio
Steven Swarbrick is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (2023), The Earth Is Evil (2025), and Divest: An Essay on Political Masochism (2026). He is a coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (2024).
Speaker Bio
Mathias Nilges is Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. His recent books include How to Read a Moment: The American Novel and the Crisis of the Present. He is currently working on a book project on the politics of literature and criticism in the context of the climate emergency and neo-authoritarianism. A portion of this project, an essay that examines the climate novel, has recently been published in South Atlantic Quarterly.
Speaker Bio
Ian Maxton is a novelist, critic, and teacher. He is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University. He is the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2022) and, with Steven Swarbrick, a co-author of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). Excerpts from a monograph in progress, titled "The Climate after the Fact," have appeared in Critical Inquiry and Representations.
Speaker Bio
Joshua Schuster is professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is author of What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham 2023), co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (Minnesota 2021), and The Ecology of Modernism (Alabama 2015).
Speaker Bio
Adam R. Rosenthal is Associate Professor of French and Global Studies at Texas A&M University. His first book, Poetics and the Gift (Edinburgh UP 2022), traces the expansive role of gifts and gift-giving in Western poetry, while his second book, Prosthetic Immortalities (Minnesota UP 2024), asks how philosophical, poetic, and religious tropes of immortality inform biological and transhuman notions of immortal and indefinite life.
Speaker Bio
Tobias Menely is Professor of English at UC Davis. He is the author of Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago 2021) and the The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago 2015) and the co-editor with Jesse Oak Taylor of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geological Times (Penn State 2017).