Ecocriticism

While the Anthropocene concept maintains a central role in ecocriticism, in 2024 scholars have continued to trouble the ways it ‘allows “the human”’, as Claire Colebrook writes, ‘to be a grand narrative of geological scale’, homogenising the ‘we’ that is culpable for unfolding planetary crises while also cementing the human as ultimate planetary agent (Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene, p. 84). The work reviewed in this essay covers a range of topics that work to multiply and complicate this ‘we’ from a variety of fields and disciplinary perspectives, including literary theory, the environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, extinction studies, philosophy and theoretical biology. The year’s work in ecocriticism is also marked by a desire to rethink the field’s existing methods, in addition to the methods via which stories of environmental crisis are told more broadly. I examine works that highlight the limitations of critique for facilitating hope in relation to ubiquitous toxicity; the ways in which marine life troubles methods of extinction storytelling; the problems with considering deep time to be unthinkable and incompatible with human phenomenology; and the questions eluded by the field’s own reliance on mutualism, entanglement and relationality as theoretical figures for ecological hope. The review focuses on two edited collections, one monograph, a special section of a journal, and two individual articles, and is divided into four sections: 1. Affective Ecocriticism; 2. Storying Blue Extinction; 3. Theorising the Impersonal; and 4. The Dreams of Mutualism.