Disaster's memory: the Anthropocene narrative

Abstract

The coexistence and connection of past, present and future is a core aspect in the books by Filhol and Macfarlane, and already announced in Sebald’s The Ring of Saturn. These writers elaborate and surpass the classic dystopias; the characteristic of their fiction and non-fiction novels consists in retrospectively projecting the image of disaster, not conceiving it only as an expectation or as the starting point of a new era. This prerogative evidently also requires the adoption of narrative forms that leave the codes of apocalyptic narration and the patterns of fiction inspired by that theme.