Citation:
Date Published:
6 June 2022Abstract:
In the context of overlapping anthropogenic threats to environmental knowledge and cultural memory, this article asks: what can the limits of narrative tell us about the endangered status of cultural memory and the archival relationships of contemporary literature? It argues that metaleptic moves in these narratives can be read as a historical response to material precarities in contemporary society. Read dialectically, these developments may be understood as a formal response to this precarity and a felt sense of the limits of literature to authenticate its intervention into the conditions it describes. This article draws on examples from James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s Human Matter, Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory, and short stories from Phenderson Djèlí Clark and Ken Liu. Reading across literary fiction, memoir, and speculative fiction, this article explores how the limits of narrative are turned into opportunities for further opening the text to the world.
February 2022: C. Parker Krieg teaches Exploratory and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Helsinki, affiliated with the Humanities program in the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science. He is co-editor of Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts, and his articles appear in Textual Practice, Studies in American Fiction, and A/B: Auto/Biography Studies.