Anxiety, Incorporated: Reading Entanglement and Attachment in Contemporary Speculative Literature by N.K. Jemisin, Louise Erdrich, and Ruth Ozeki

Literatures addressing ecological crisis often hail “entanglement” as a transformative narrative form, inspiring environmentally conscious readers to urgent and necessary action. Narratives of entanglement are intended to underscore a pressing need to mitigate humans’ planet-sized capacity for harm, and being harmed, in the Anthropocene. Entanglement draws attention to both the ways that humans in the Anthropocene visit harm upon the world around them – whether or not they intend to – and to the ways harm is visited upon them in forms of contamination, infiltration, and catastrophe that are not always visible or predictable. This feature of entanglement is, I argue, particularly intensified when structured by the generic conventions of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. These generic structures work together with narratives of entanglement to project readers who either “succeed” to be moved in appropriate ways to action, or who “fail” by remaining trapped in a state of inaction. These “failed” readers, I argue, fail to act not because they do not care enough, but because they are suspended in the affective landscape of anxiety and pervasive threat that narratives of entanglement intentionally invoke as a thing not to work through, but to act in spite of. My project intervenes to question and analyze the sense of pervasive threat that narratives of entanglement rely on to manufacture and naturalize a permanent state of irresolvable anxiety, and to explore the ways that science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction have conventionally been leveraged to train readers to respond to entanglement in this way. I build upon the work of Brad Evans and Julian Reid who have analyzed the neoliberal “regime of insecurity,” which valorizes resilience in the face of pervasive and inevitable threat in the Anthropocene, to suggest that conventional narratives of entanglement work to normalize regimes of insecurity and construct resilient subjects. Because this construction is so dependent upon the polarization of successful and failed readers, I turn to center narratives of ecological crisis that directly, in form and content, address and complicate the relation between genre reading, anxiety, and entanglement. My dissertation reads N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) as texts specifically intervening in both the systemic and generic structures of narrative which produce successful and failed readers on the basis of their reaction to anxiety about entangled attachments and interconnections. Chapter 1 explores the narrative pedagogy of Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which Jemisin uses to question the foundations of a desire for “systematization” in secondary-world fantasy fiction which normalizes a “survival mindset” always looking for the potential threat of what is missing or unnoticed in a text. Chapter 2 turns to Future Home of the Living God, which has been widely critiqued in popular reviews as a “failure” of feminist critical dystopia. I show that these reviews reveal an anxiety cultivated by feminist critical dystopia’s investment in possibilistic logics, as defined by Lindsay Thomas, which Erdrich uses metafictive structures of storytelling to actively interrupt and re-route. Chapter 3, finally, examines Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being as a text which narrates and affirms relationships defined by a failure to remember, understand, and detach from information as it is structured by the hyperconnectivity and entanglement of information technologies.