Abstract
This chapter close-reads The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer (The Strange Bird: A Borne Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017) in light of ongoing discussions in ecocriticism, posthumanism, and narrative theory. I argue that the novella takes the point of view of the nonhuman without rendering the plot genre-formulaic and depoliticised on the one hand, and without succumbing to pure allegory on the other. Based on the assumption that weird narratives demonstrate an affinity for expressing ecological anxieties via nonhuman characters by challenging tensions between hierarchical binaries such as subject and object, self and other, I argue that The Strange Bird uses affordances of the weird mode to trouble (under)current notions of subjectivity and agency, specifically by experimenting with nonhuman narration, affect, and a form of narrativised anamorphic projection.
This chapter has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 714166).
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Notes
- 1.
In all in-text citations hereafter, “SB” refers to The Strange Bird.
- 2.
In this chapter, the Anthropocene should be understood in terms of what Timothy Clark calls a loose “pseudo-geological concept,” one used to “mark a threshold in human historical self-understanding” (Clark 2019, 21).
- 3.
“‘[T]he Critical Zone’ (CZ) designates the (mostly continental) layers from the top of the canopy to the mother rocks, thus foregrounding the thin, porous and permeable layer where life has modified the cycles of matter by activating or catalyzing physical and chemical reactions” (Arènes et al. 2018, 121).
- 4.
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Ulstein, G. (2021). “Just a Surface”: Anamorphic Perspective and Nonhuman Narration in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Strange Bird. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_14
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