EVENT POSTPONED Are Mushrooms Goth? Genre and ‘Life in Capitalist Ruins'
Event details
The increasing consensus appears to be that only nonrealist genres—roughly divided into neomodernist and speculative modes—are adequate to the present demands of what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has called “life in capitalist ruins.” Yet modernism has been fully absorbed into corporate culture, while “genre fiction” rules both the culture industry and, as Andrew Hoberek has argued, the literary prestige economy. Neither, then, seems to mount any inherent resistance to the status quo. This talk reconsiders the state of contemporary fiction genres through the recent vogue for fungi as an imaginative resource for withstanding the twin crises of economics and ecology of the present moment. Considering fiction by Rivers Solomon and Jenny Hval, I suggest that both modernist and speculative modes rely crucially on allegory to engage with the mycological. Perhaps counterintuitively, though, it is genre fiction’s avowal of fictionality and, often, absurdity that allows it to mount mycological allegories that keep faith with history.
About the speaker
Natalia Cecire
Natalia Cecire is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Sussex. Her book Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2019. She is currently working on a book on the biology research networks across Bryn Mawr College and Johns Hopkins Medical School around 1900 and the queer modernist women who intersected with those networks. With Samuel Solomon, she is also at work on a project on mushrooms and racial capitalism.