ABSTRACT
Genres are crucial at the interface of literature and the Anthropocene: they are not only templates for organizing our experiences of the world, they are also affective scenarios through which we orient ourselves in a world whose coordinates we haven’t yet fully understood. Recent literary scholarship has mostly been critical of the capacities of literary realism to capture the unruly realities of the Anthropocene, and has tended to affirm the relevance of historically disparaged genres such as science fiction and horror. The chapter surveys approaches that aim to map particular formal features on specific affective reader responses, before it turns to a comparative case study on literature about the Arctic, with a focus on Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, to argue that it might be the friction between different generic templates that provides the best intimation of a nonhuman reality. The rest of the chapter links this intimation to the conceptual differences between worlds, globes, and planets, and explores the affordances of different media (photography, cinema, and post-cinema) to cultivate such apprehensions of a nonhuman dimension to life. All these media make us apprehend an alien reality, and they do so in complementary and media-specific ways.
