1887
Volume 29, Issue 2
  • ISSN 1387-6740
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9935
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Abstract

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, works depicting a post-human world have become a popular non-fiction genre. This kind of is an extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. In this article, I examine one such disanthropic narrative, Alan Weisman’s bestselling non-fiction book (2007), using the theoretical framework of narrative fictionality studies. falls between the conventional oppositional pairing of factual and fictional narratives. The book bases its rhetoric heavily on scientific facts – or at least on scientific expectations – especially in its use of interviews with scientists. Nevertheless, the core idea of a world without humans is inevitably fictional since the presence of readers makes the book’s premise manifestly counterfactual and paradoxical. In my analysis, I adopt a rhetorical approach to fictionality and factuality to ask how particular techniques and strategies connected to fictionality and factuality are employed in Weisman’s text in order to discuss the anxieties, desires, hopes, and fears of the possibility of human extinction.

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/content/journals/10.1075/ni.19022.laa
2019-10-16
2025-02-11
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): Anthropocene; factuality; fictionality; referentiality; thought-experiments
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