“It Wants to Become Real and Can Only Become Prose”

This essay redeploys the terms “Anthropocene” and “focalization” to function as formal tools for analyzing how the Anthropocene exists in the possible spaces of literature in its imaginary form. It develops the term “Anthropocenic focalization” to show how the Anthropocene influences the ways literary worlds are formed across both fictional and nonfictional texts, in the case of this essay, 10:04 by Ben Lerner and The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Through a spatial analysis of descriptions in these works, the chapter articulates three aspects of Anthropocenic focalization: how it reforms the human scale of fiction, how catastrophe is projected into possible worlds, and the ways pronouns are used to entangle the reader in these spaces.