Explores the manifold ways that complexity is framed, understood and negotiated in contemporary Anglophone fiction
How does fiction—including both print books and digital literature in the video game medium—imagine the complexity of issues such as migration or climate change? How does it envisage our societies’ dependence on technological networks and supply chains that most of us don’t understand? Figures of Complexity shows how fiction pushes complexity beyond its associations with desirable nuance and instead links it to material, psychological and ethical pitfalls that are distinctive of the present moment—a sense of reality getting out of hand, being difficult or overpowering, or facing us with unsolvable moral dilemmas. Through its engagement with works by authors such as Omar El Akkad, Lauren Groff, Yaa Gyasi and Hanya Yanagihara, the book examines a wide range of imaginative responses to these challenges.
Explores the manifold ways that complexity is framed, understood and negotiated in contemporary Anglophone fiction.
Reviews
This is a much-needed book that combines the literary, narrative and experiential aspects of complexity with those of urgent current social issues, including climate change, migration, and the effects of colonial history. Through carefully chosen examples and eloquent analysis, Marco Caracciolo traces the formal as well as affective aspects of complexity that literary and real-world situations share, making the former a paradigm for the latter, and giving strong attestation to the importance of narrative complexity as an analytical tool for understanding art and life alike. -- Maria Poulaki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Figuring the Spectrum of Complexity
1. Tangle: Paranarratives of Climate Anxiety
2. Atmosphere: Scales of Mobility
3. Paperwork: Boredom and Climate Change
4. Network: How the Internet Enters Narrative Space
5. Infrastructure: The Threat of Complexity
6. Knot: Science Not Made for TED Talks
7. Puzzle: Detecting Colonial History
8. Bog: Materializing Patriarchal Violence
9. Loop: Uncomfortable Implication
Coda: Mazes and Layers
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English at Ghent University, Belgium. His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media (particularly video games). He is the author of ten books, including With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (co-authored with Karin Kukkonen, 2021), Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (2022), and Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (2022; winner of the Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative).
