ABSTRACT
This essay considers post-1945 literature about extinction, showing how human emotions were portrayed as catalysts for change. In her 2016 study, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Ursula Heise argues that most contemporary texts concerning extinction communicate an underlying sense that “animals and, more rarely, plants and other organisms, are cultural tools and agents in humans’ thinking about themselves, their communities, their histories, and their futures.” Heise thus identifies feelings of sadness and grief as the primary affects—and elegy and tragedy as the major genres—that have been deployed to portray the human experience of extinction. Heise asks, “Is it possible to acknowledge the realities of large-scale species extinction and yet to move beyond mourning, melancholia, and nostalgia to a more affirmative vision of our biological future?” This chapter argues that, in the past half-century, literature about extinction has already offered complex affective alternatives, and demonstrates that these emotions are represented not simply as individual, passive experiences, but as active means of changing our collective fate. In doing so, the chapter traces the centrality of capitalism to these narratives and considers the relation of extinction to the act of writing and the literary form of the trilogy.
