From the Grotesque to Nuclear-Age Precedents: The Modes and Meanings of Cli-fi Humor

Heights They Should Never Have Scaled: Our (Weird) Planet

“…It also points toward the large number of humanities scholars currently engaged in a neologism race to find the stories, concepts, or words that capture the zeitgeist of the Anthropocene. The emergent concepts often have direct antecedents and roots in literature, and it is not surprising that they, in a time of catastrophe and crisis, turn to aesthetic registers like horror (Clark 2020;Dillon 2015;Thacker 2011;Tidwell 2014), or registers and modes related to horror, such as the sublime (Salmose 2018;Williston 2016), the weird (Mayer 2018;Morton 2016;Tabas 2015), the uncanny (Andersen 2016;Ghosh 2016), the eerie (Fisher 2016), or the grotesque (Traub 2018). By placing the emphasis on the violence and wrongness of the events portrayed, Our Planet plays into this contemporary tendency to label the planetary agency of humanity as uncanny, frightening or horrific.…”