Catastrophe(s) as Shown in World Literature of the 20th and 21st Centuries

This dossier examines how catastrophe has become a central paradigm for understanding contemporary literature and culture. While the 18th century conceptualized catastrophe as divine or natural punishment, the 21st century reframes it within the Anthropocene, attributing disasters to human agency. Competing notions such as the Capitalocene or Plantationocene underscore the plurality of causal frameworks, symptomatic of an apocalyptic imagination. Today’s literature is saturated with narratives of ecological collapse, climate change, extinction, political decay, authoritarianism, and global crises—what Leggewie and Welzer term a “meta-crisis.” Catastrophe is thus no longer a theme but a mode of thought that reshapes narrative forms, from renewed philosophical tales to hybrid testimonies engaging with science and politics. These texts often foreground non-human actors, technological anxieties, and postcolonial critiques of global inequality. Against the backdrop of COVID-19, war, and migration, the essays collected here interrogate whether disasters can serve as a “ground zero” for rethinking human values in an uncertain future.