Mark Bould’s new book The Anthropocene Unconscious makes more or less the same argument as I made in my 2008 New Formations article “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Toward a Jamesonian Ecocriticism,” later expanded in the “Terra and Trauma” chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image, but he applies it to literature rather than film. The level of critical acclaim Bould is getting indicates either that he is a much better writer than I am, that he has access to PR machinery I didn’t have (and/or the tenacity to promote his work better), that the timing is right for the argument to resonate, or, quite possibly, a mix of all of the above.
Bould’s overarching question — “What if all the stories we tell today are fundamentally about climate change,” or at least about the constellation of forces now known as “the Anthropocene”? — was my question except that back in 2008 there wasn’t an obvious and well-known author to use as one’s foil (for Bould, it’s Amitav Ghosh). And Bould is drawing out his argument over a much broader canvas. I haven’t read the book yet, so I’m not sure how directly he gets at the geopolitical and psychoanalytical dimensions that I tried to get at. At any rate, it’s great to see the argument getting a broad hearing.
