The goal of this chapter is to examine two texts from the early twentieth century addressing problems related to the Anthropocene Era -The Eternal Adam by Jules Verne and The Death of the Earth by J.-H. Rosny aîné- in order to understand the effects the environmental issues has had on the imagination of writers since the XIXth century. Through a study of these texts I will demonstrate in a dynamic way how these two authors depict collapse from the point of view of one individual, while questioning the destiny of humanity as a whole. I will examine the different characters’ perceptions of the cataclysm which is at the heart of each narrative, as well as the depiction of matters related to evolution and regression. I will also comment on the pessimistic tone of these texts and link their common themes together. While I will go back and forth between these novellas throughout three sections, I will also link them with canonical texts about ecology to show how their views on the relationship between man and nature, progress and science, are still very much relevant today. Indeed, we will see that the way they question industrial growth reminds us that since the Industrial Revolution we have always been a society that struggles with its natural habitat. In conclusion, we will understand that these novellas show that the fear of climate change is ancient, but also that the anxiety related to the collapse of our modern world has only increased since the beginning of the XXth century.

Human history has been profoundly influenced by epidemic diseases. From the Black Death to Coronavirus, they have always been a constant source of anxiety and fear, and, consequently, an integral part of Apocalyptic narratives of collapse. New contagious diseases are responsible, for example, for the end of humankind in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) or Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Although disastrous to the very end, these works do not even mention the fate of non-human animals in the post-apocalyptic world. Presumably, animals would thrive once humans are gone, yet the novels’ anthropocentric biases impede explorations into the topic. It is rather common for 19th-century narratives of collapse and human extinction to behave in this way. They rarely mention the fate of animals, and if non-human species appear at all, they usually do so as a forewarn of the looming disaster or because the animals themselves make the situation worse somehow. An instance of the first case is found in Percy Shelley’s allegorical poem The Revolt of Islam (1818) in which a pestilence roams the world killing all insects, fish, birds, and mammals before targeting humans. An example of the second is found in the Brazilian novel Hunger (A Fome, 1898) by Rodolfo Teófilo in which a cholera outbreak transforms animals into ferocious beasts which prey on humans. Contemporary narratives, on the other hand, tend to offer equal attention to both human and non human misfortunes caused by epidemics. In our view, this enlarged interest results from an urge to inform and alert about climate change, and also from an scientific understanding of the major role zoonotic diseases and ecological imbalances play in the rise of pandemics (Shah 2017, Quammen 2012). Two recent novels are cases in point: the MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) by Margaret Atwood, in which a laboratory-disease is developed to save Nature by annihilating humans; and The Near-End of the World (O Quase Fim do Mundo, 2008) by the acclaimed Angolan writer Pepetela, in which a handful of humans and animals have to revive life on Earth after a global cataclysm. Both texts are concerned by the fate of human and non-human actors and, interestingly, both vary considerably in the narrative techniques employed. Unlike their 19th century counterparts, which normally offer only one narrative voice, the texts by Atwood and Pepetela are multifaceted and fragmented. In this paper, by using tools of comparative literature and cultural history, we seek to compare these two pairs of works to investigate their stance on human and animal relations and their usage of different voices to narrate extinctions. We believe this comparison to be a fruitful one because these fours texts by Shelley, Teófilo, Atwood and Pepetela are linked thematically and structurally: two originate in the center (England, Canada), two in periphery (Angola, Brazil); two date from the 19th-century, two from the 21st century; two employ traditional narration, two are experimental. In that sense, these four texts are complementary and offer a panorama of the representation of extinctions caused by epidemics.

I'm going to co-edit issue 63 of French academic journal of English-speaking cultures studies "Caliban" (Presses Universitaires du Midi; CAS research group, from Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès). It is due to be published in June 2020, it will be entitled "Dynamics of collapse in fantasy, the fantastic and SF", and it will be about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic SF/fantasy/horror/etc., and how today's ongoing upheavals of economies, societies, energy resources, climate, biodiversity, etc., as well as the recently created field of research into those phenomena, known as "collapsology", can change the writing, reading and understanding of such tales of destruction. The PDF file contains the call for papers in both French and English. Submitted papers must be sent by 15 November, 2019.

Tamás Kaszás’s experimental practice, in which an assemblage of enlightening residues from past epochs and their social struggles combine with future oriented imaginings around the prospects for the earth, models for selfsufficiency and techniques of practical survival, calls for a sensitive interpretive framework that is in tune with artist’s methods and intentions. Just like laboratories, closely controlled spaces where special care is required to maintain the ideal conditions for research if one is not to endanger the in tegrity of the work that goes on there, to gain entry to the collage of references and ideas that make up the environment of the artwork requires similar attentiveness. In this essay the interlinked spheres of Kaszás’s practice are approached through an analysis of the artist’s own sources, the parallels offered by ecological thought and the theoretical insights of anti-capitalist critique. After graduating from the Intermedia department of Budapest Academy of Fi...

The end of the world as we know it takes many different forms in literature. In recent years, many authors have focused on the consequences of a civilizational collapse in our society, and the ways in which we try to survive. In this paper, we analyze the unique vision of collapse presented by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya in her tale The New Robinson Crusoes, which follows a family who go back to nature to find salvation in a crisis context. We consider all the challenges they face to survive in the locus non amoenus they and their few fellow survivors inhabit. Also, the author gives us a set of ethical guidelines on how to survive in a hostile environment amid a post-apocalyptic landscape. In this paper we present them in the form of a Decalogue that could serve as a guide to how humanity should evolve if it intends to face the challenges posed by the twenty-first century.

Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities. Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes”, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling. Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.