Presents post-apocalyptic fiction as an important and unique source of new realist ontologies
What is the singular reality of humanistic objects of study? By pairing post-apocalyptic novels by Margaret Atwood, José Saramago, Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy with new realist theories, Monika Kaup shows that, just as new realist theory can illuminate post-apocalyptic literature, post-apocalyptic literature also embeds new theories of the real.
She showcases a context-based concept of the real, arguing that new realisms of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks and ecologies, rather than old realisms of isolated parts and things, represent the most promising escape from the impasses of constructivism and positivism.
To achieve this Kaup brings together four contemporary theories that have never been considered together before and that formulate context-based realisms: Bruno Latour's actor-network theory; Chilean neurophenomenologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's theories of autopoiesis and enactivism; German philosopher Markus Gabriel's new ontology of fields of sense; French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of givenness and American philosopher Alphonso Lingis's phenomenology of passionate identification.
Monika Kaup is Professor of English at the University of Washington

Monika Kaup is Professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (University of Virginia Press 2012) and she is co-editor of Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Duke University Press 2010).

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. New Ecological Realisms and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; 2. The New Realism of the Factish and the Political Ecology of Humans and Non-Humans: Bruno Latour and Margaret Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy; 3. The Ontology of Knowledge as the Enaction of Mind and World: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's Autopoietic Theory and José Saramago's Blindness; 4. Apocalypse as Field of Sense: Markus Gabriel's Ontology of Fields of Sense and Octavia Butler's Parable Series; 5. New Phenomenologies after Poststructuralism (Jean-Luc Marion and Alphonso Lingis) and Cormac McCarthy's The Road; Works Cited.