ABSTRACT
This chapter critically surveys and tests a number of popular theoretical paradigms for thinking the nonhuman world: material ecocriticism, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, vibrant materialism, and critical posthumanism. The chapter assesses the relative affordances of these approaches through a reading of John Burnside’s novel Glister, and shows how they ultimately fail to apprehend the distinctions between different forms of difference—whether those be biological, cosmic, cultural, or social. The chapter discusses the all-important issue of scale, and introduces the notions “scale variance” and “scale effects” to underline the importance of establishing distinctions between different ontological realms. It concludes with a discussion of the material ecocritical notion of “storied matter,” to conclude with the suggestion that, more than storytelling, it is writing that offers a literary model for thinking about the Anthropocene world.
