Climate change may be a scientific certainty, but the magnitude of its impact on the future of humanity - and of the Earth's ecosystems - cannot be predicted with absolute precision, given the sheer ...number of factors involved. In this article, I explore two fictional works - Jeff VanderMeer's novella The Strange Bird and Alexis Wright's novel The Swan Book - that establish a connection between the uncertainty surrounding the climate crisis and animal characters whose minds remain opaque and unreadable. In my reading of these works, the inability to read animals' mental processes, symbolic significance, and plot function mirrors the distressing precariousness of our present situation as a species teetering, with many other life forms, on the brink of a global disaster.
The scientific laboratory is often construed as a space in which laboratory animals are sacrificed on the altar of biomedical progress. However, this understanding of nonhuman animals raises ...significant ethical concerns and appears complicit in the anthropocentric and colonial violence that creates sacrifice zones in Naomi Klein's sense. In this article, we argue that contemporary literature can work towards an imaginative and affective reframing of the lab, which is no longer seen as a sacrifice zone but as a contact zone-a space of relationality and entanglement across the human-nonhuman divide. To explore this shift, we offer close readings of two contemporary narratives that centre on the lab: Tania Hershman's short story 'Grounded' and Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird. In both of these texts, animals refuse to be made data through sacrifice and instead affirm, if in a limited sense, their own autonomy and vitality. Literary experimentation on a stylistic level plays a key role in this process: our readings highlight how both narratives evoke embodied (and more specifically haptic) connectedness with animals by deploying literary strategies that deconstruct the visual language associated with scientific objectivity.
It is almost a trope in contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene to call for new narratives that are able to convey the scale of the ecological crisis. When does a narrative become new, however? ...In this article, I build on Luc Herman and Bart Vervaeck’s theory of narrative in culture to develop a preliminary answer to that question. I first explore the field of Anthropocene discourse and chart the ways in which stories about the ecological crisis can depart from traditional narrative templates. Novelty, from that perspective, is a function of the complexity of narrative’s engagement with existing stories, genres, and motifs. To exemplify this approach, I focus on Nathaniel Rich’s nonfiction book Losing Earth (2019), which reconstructs the early days of the climate change debate in the 1980s. In my reading, Rich’s work fails to do justice to the complexity of the Anthropocene because it falls back on a conventional narrative structure – the tragic plot – and it makes use of an actantial structure that neatly separates heroes and villains. By discussing the shortcomings of Rich’s account, I emphasize the centrality of narrative form in negotiating the Anthropocene in both fiction and nonfictional discourse.
The favorable effects of physical activity on the cardiovascular system have been well described in scientific literature. Physical activity reduces cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in both ...healthy subjects and in patients with cardiovascular disease. However, different intensity levels of physical activity have a different impact on the cardiovascular system. Some data support the hypothesis of a "physical activity paradox": repetitive exposure to vigorous physical activity may induce biological effects that counteract the benefits of moderate intensity levels of physical activity. In this review, we report the main effects of acute and chronic physical activity on the cardiovascular system and we summarize the biochemical mechanisms that may explain these effects.
Bringing together narrative theory, migration studies, and contemporary discussions in the environmental humanities, this article considers the significance of the concept of scale for media ...narratives on migration. The starting point is that migration is a multiscalar phenomenon that ranges from migrants’ personal experience to the global factors (such as poverty and climate change) that shape migration on a planetary scale. Media narratives are often unable to bring together those scales, privileging the scale of regional or national debates at the expense of migrants’ experience or global phenomena. We demonstrate that idea through the qualitative analysis of migration coverage in the Italian media, focusing on two newspapers (Corriere della sera and Il Giornale) and two periods in 2015 and 2022. We thus compare what is frequently described as the refugee “crisis” of 2015 and the wave of migration created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The analysis shows that, in both newspapers, migration coverage in 2015 was marked by a disconnect between local and global events, whereas in 2022 the event structure of the war afforded closer integration between scales. This suggests that, even when no simple causal linked can be established between the causes of migration and its effects, more efforts are needed to project a complex, nuanced image of migration in media storytelling.
Drawing inspiration from the so-called ontological turn in anthropology and enactivist philosophy, this article argues that a significant strand of twenty-first-century fiction responds to ...ontological challenges through stylistic and narrative means, and that this engagement can help differentiate contemporary literary practices from postmodernist ones. No longer linguistically autonomous or dualistically separate from the nonhuman world, the (human) subject is brought back into the fold of nonhuman materiality, even as a number of conceptual and affective tensions emerge in the process. The article offers a close reading of Ali Smith's novel How to Be Both (2014) to explore this destabilization of subjectivity in the contemporary novel and how it speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding the human's entanglement with materiality conceived of in physical, biological, or technological terms.
This article engages with the challenges of narrating catastrophe in so-called postapocalyptic fiction, and more specifically in three contemporary novels that bring formal and stylistic ...sophistication to the genre: Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014). I claim that these novels are able to evoke a strong sense of the disrupted temporality of catastrophe through what I call “negative strategies.” These are formal devices that leverage the underlying psychological structure of negation in order to confront readers with the absence of the preapocalyptic world. My textual analyses are part of a broader attempt to understand how the imbrication of human and nonhuman realities (as revealed, in my corpus, by catastrophe) impacts narrative not just in thematic but in formal terms.
Narrative theory is devoting increasing attention to we-narrative and, more generally, stories that center on groups. However, the we in question tends to be a human one. In this article, I argue ...that narrative can also foreground nonhuman assemblages (animals, plants, material objects, etc.) and can employ this focus to question anthropocentric assumptions. I discuss two examples: Tinkers (2009), by Paul Harding, in which a more-than-human we emerges and brings together the human protagonists and cosmic realities; and The Overstory (2018), by Richard Powers, whose plot organization builds on an analogy between a group of environmental activists and a symbiotic collective of plants and fungi. Through we-narrative (Harding) and formal engagement with collectivity (Powers), these contemporary works demonstrate how narrative (and narrative theory) can speak to current debates on the ecological crisis: imagining more-than-human assemblages through narrative form calls for a profound rethinking of collective behavior on a planetary scale.
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