Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene

I. scale and the study of narrative

Questions of scale have been widely discussed in studies of literature in general and narrative in particular over the last two decades. These discussions have revolved around three complexes of issues: the broadening of canons, the use of digital tools, and the ability of existing narrative forms to engage with large scales of space and time.

The broadening of textual canons that literary scholars engage and its impact on critical methods and the understanding of literary forms has been debated at least since the 1980s. Comparatists addressed this question in Charles Bernheimer's 1993 ACLA Report on the State of the Discipline, Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, an anthology of essays that explored how comparative literature might scale up to a genuinely global understanding of its subject matter. After the turn of the millennium, the paradigms of "world literature," proposed by Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch, and of distant reading, articulated by Franco Moretti, outlined approaches to the new global scope of literature: considerations of scale, in other words, had to do with the object of literary study.¹ More specialized fields such as the study of modernist literature have also seen extensive debates about the globalization of their canon and the questions of scale this expansion raises.²

In its original formulation in the essay "Conjectures on World Literature," Moretti's concept of distant reading referred to the study of global literature through the intermediary of expert scholarship rather than first-hand close reading as it has been practiced in the North American academy since the 1960s. But over the next decade, it became more closely associated with the use of digital quantitative methods in literary study that Moretti also came to pioneer, even as the task of reading an ever-growing world literary canon in a comparatist vein took on additional historical dimensions. Literature, especially texts produced before 1900, became increasingly available in electronic formats, and offered the possibility of researching archives with research questions in mind that had been previously unanswerable: questions, for example, about a corpus of thousands rather than just a few dozen Victorian novels. The numerical scaling-up of the canon at that moment came to include not only study objects but also methods, since a body of 4,000 or more novels cannot be researched only by means of close reading. New digital tools that were being developed to address this vastly expanded canon became themselves objects of heated debate between those such as Moretti and Matthew Jockers, who argued that they offered a different, if not necessarily better, perspective on literary history, and those who defended close reading as the unalienable foundation of humanistic study. Debates about scale, then, came to include questions of investigative methods and tools.

The third dimension of literary-critical debates about scale, to which this essay will seek to contribute, concerns the ways in which literary forms accommodate and sometimes generate ideas about space, time, and agency. Ever since investigations of the modernist legacy in literature and culture shifted in emphasis from postmodernism to globalization in the mid-1990s, the question of how literary forms might scale up from the individual, the family, or the nation to the world as a whole have informed numerous concepts and analyses: Moretti's concept of "modern epic"; Bruce Robbins's and Pheng Cheah's explorations of cosmopolitanism and literature; Gayatri Spivak's and Wai-Chee Dimock's investigations of "planetarity" (as distinguished from "globalization") and planetary literature; and the approaches to literature by David Palumbo-Liu, Nirvana Tanoukhi, and Robbins in the context of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory, to name just a few.³ Analyses more specifically focused on fiction have in addition proposed concepts such as the "encyclopedic novel," the "mega-novel," the "systems novel," and the "maximalist novel" to describe the morphology of typically very long novels from the last fifty years that have aspired to capture the totality of the world.⁴

Most of these studies focus on ways in which literary forms—the novel above all—might be able to...