A bold new consideration of climate change between narratives of the Earth’s layers and policy of the present

 

Long seen as a realm of mystery and possibility, the subsurface beneath our feet has taken on all-too-real import in the era of climate change. Can reading narratives of the past that take imaginative leaps under the surface better attune us to our present knowledge of a warming planet?

In Subsurface, Karen Pinkus looks below the surface of texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Sand, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Jules Verne to find the buried origins of capitalist fantasies in which humans take what they want from the earth. Putting such texts into conversation with narrative theory, critical theory, geology, and climate policy, she shows that the subsurface has been, in our past, a place of myth and stories of male voyages down to gain knowledge—but it is also now the realm of fossil fuels. How do these two modes intertwine?

A highly original take on evocative terms such as extraction, burial, fossils, deep time, and speculative futurity, Subsurface questions the certainty of comfortable narrative arcs. It asks us to read literature with and against the figure of the geological column, with and against fossil fuels and the emissions warming our planet. As we see our former selves move into the distance, what new modes of imagination might we summon?

Karen Pinkus is professor of romance studies and comparative literature at Cornell University. She is author of several books, including Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary (Minnesota, 2016).

"Considering a renewal of life that would begin in the subsurface of the earth, Karen Pinkus deftly navigates between nineteenth-century literature and current issues in geology, critical theory, and philosophy. Digging into the past to imagine a sustainable future, written with spark and wit, Subsurface is a welcome contribution to the environmental humanities."—Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University

"A truly geologic, stratigraphic criticism of and for the multiple layers and ages of climate change. Karen Pinkus’s work forms the critical bedrock of environmental and energy humanities. Here, she goes underground, surveying a classic range of subterranean narratives and their striated formations across time and space, fusing with other realms of knowledge that climate challenges literature to uncover. Pinkus's critical alchemy mines novel seams, peels back undiscovered layers of texts and meaning, and cracks open new possibilities for reading narrative within and against the challenges of climate's unfolding futures. Tunneling back and forth from the crucial century of Verne and the rise of geology to contemporary debates over geoengineering, carbon sequestration, and extractivism, she explores carbonizing economic theory and assesses the strange formations of climate finance en route. Subsurface reassesses the grounds of and for literature and literary criticism as resource and method to confront our age of earthbound and atmospheric crisis, mapping its unruly domains, its shifting terrain and hidden impacts. This is exactly the kind of nonconformist analysis we need to navigate climate's deep and complex resonances."—Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick