Transscalar Critique: Crisis and Form in the Anthropocene Contemporary

“Transscalar Critique” proposes a new model of literary criticism for reading in the Anthropocene. I argue that contemporary literature and literary criticism are defined by a problem of scale. Critics and novelists have sought to capture the expansiveness of a larger and more connected world while simultaneously contracting inwards, refocusing on smaller units of analysis. By looking at representations of specific crises and foregrounding scale as a central analytic, my dissertation develops a mode of critique that is at once discursive, geologic, political, and ontological. “Transscalar Critique” offers a survey of the Anthropocene contemporary to suggest that paying attention to questions of the micro-scale of the word is just as important as the macro-scale of the world. In the first half of this dissertation, I argue that the 2008 Financial Crisis and climate change have been represented as monoscalar. Existing literary and critical accounts of these events only attend to their human scale, imaging crisis as the result of specific individuals and a momentary interruption in a teleological narrative of technological and economic expansion. “Transscalar Critique” reveals the way that these very specific crises in fact result from the co-constitutional convergence of human and nonhuman life. In the second half of the dissertation, I read two authors I understand as specifically transscalar, Ben Lerner and Paul Beatty. Lerner develops an ambient mode of literary fiction and critique that dissolves the distinction between text and world, rescaling the relationship between audience, author, and work of art. Beatty uses satire as a way to both represent and critique the divergent scales of the contemporary, writing fiction that is just as concerned with environmental and economic issues as it is with questions of race and aesthetic value. It is between these scales, “Transscalar Critique” argues, that we can understand what it means to live in a contemporary backlit by the perennial crisis of the Anthropocene.

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