Acasă Articole RTR Un realism ciudat pentru o realitate ciudată: romanul în Era Prăbușirii Ecologice
Un realism ciudat pentru o realitate ciudată: romanul în Era Prăbușirii Ecologice
Rezumat
A Weird Realism for a Weird Reality: The Novel in the Age of Ecological Meltdown
Abstract: This article starts from the claim that contemporary philosophy and literary criticism witness a strong return of realism as an epistemic practice in a structurally “weird” world. From Eugene Thacker’s speculative realism and his notion of “spectral life” to Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjects, realism is no longer understood as neutral mirroring but as a set of generative procedures of insight into the real within a distributed, more-than-human reality. In literary studies, this turn manifests in John Thieme’s Anthropocene Realism, which multiplies realist modes (social, visceral, gradualist) in order to narrativise climate crisis. Building on the hypothesis that the modern novel—tied to the nation-state, narrow chronotopes and “periodised” time—is structurally ill-equipped to represent hyperobjects, the article reads two works that crack open the “round” novel: Doris Lessing’s The Cleft and James Bradley’s Clade. Lessing recuperates a premodern epic imaginary and sets it at odds with realist devices (the found manuscript), while Bradley develops a form of “gradualist realism” anchored in an “extreme long present”, where the continuity of a family clade becomes a narrative infrastructure for articulating deep time, extinction and the transmission—and interruption—of memory. The analysis foregrounds two major procedures: (1) the deliberate obscuring of causal chains as a way of responding epistemically to Anthropocene complexity (non-linearity, distributed agency) and (2) the refusal of realist closure in favour of liminal images such as Clade’s “Shimmering”, which resonate with Michael Taussig’s “metamorphic sublime”. Ultimately, the article argues for a modular, weird realism, capable of holding catastrophe, everyday life and the re-enchantment of nature together, without reverting either to apocalyptic narratives or to consolatory fantasies of social and planetary restoration.
Keywords: Anthropocene realism, speculative/weird realism, hyperobjects, narrative obscurity, metamorphic sublime
Citation suggestion: Deliu, Ana-Maria. “Un realism ciudat pentru o realitate ciudată: romanul în Era Prăbușirii Ecologice”. Transilvania, no. 12 (2025): 26-36.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2025.12.05.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS –UEFISCDI, project number PN-IV-P2-2.1-TE-2023-1275, within PNCDI IV.
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