Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction

Lucy Bond is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Westminster, UK. Her most recent publications include Frames of Memory after 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law (2015), and Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (co-edited with Stef Craps and Pieter Vermeulen, 2017).Ben De Bruyn is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He is the author of Wolfgang Iser: A Companion (2012) and co-editor of Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History (2016). He is currently finishing his new book, The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape (2018).Jessica Rapson is a Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice (2015), and the co-editor of The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders (with Lucy Bond, 2014).

• Introduction: Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction 1. Future readers: narrating the human in the Anthropocene 2. Speculative memory, the planetary and genre fiction 3. ‘Family territory’ to the ‘circumference of the earth’: local and planetary memories of climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour 4. Writing the liquid city: excavating urban ecologies after Katrina 5. Realism 4°. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10:04 6. ‘I love Alaska’: posthuman subjectivity and memory on the final frontier of our ecological crisis 7. ‘In the eyeblink of a planet you were born, died, and your bones disintegrated’: scales of mourning and velocities of memory in Philipp Meyer’s American Rust 8. Afterword: The time of planetary memory