Ben De Bruyn
Biographic Data
| ID | 3087807 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben De Bruyn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | De Bruyn |
| SIGNATURE | DE BRUYN B |
| AFFILIATIONS | UCLouvain |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0128-9021 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The Webs of Life
Review of: Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. Princeton University Press, 2022. 368 pp. $33.00 (hb). and Karen Bakker, Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth. MIT Press, 2024. 288 pp. $29.95 (hb
Introduction
To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategi…
The Everyday Pluriverse
This chapter examines Jon McGregor’s prize-winning novel Reservoir 13 against the background of debates on biodiversity loss and multiscalar fiction, paying special attention to its evocation of a particular rural mesocosm. After reviewing the text’s idiosyncratic participation in the traditions of rural and crime fiction, the analysis explains how the novel redirects the reader’s attention from human to environmental concerns and evokes a multip…
The Mom and the Many
This article examines Lucy Ellmann's encyclopedic novel Ducks, Newburyport (2019) in the context of debates on modernist legacies, animal characters, and climate fiction. It pays particular attention to the text's signature strategy of including anecdotes about nonhuman creatures exposed to distinct forms of violence, anecdotes that reveal the concerns of the human narrator and her daughter but also highlight other animals, their unfamiliar pheno…
The Great Displacement
This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohs…
The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape
Earth Emotions
Reviewed by: Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A. Albrecht Ben De Bruyn (bio) Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A. Albrecht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 256 pp. How does life on an increasingly degraded planet make us feel, how should it make us feel, and how can we talk about those environmental emotions in ways that foster more convivial futures? These are urgent questions at the start of the tw…
Realism 4°. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10
A rare example of a contemporary climate-change novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 joins reflections on our increasingly unrecognisable planet with a remarkably realist attention to everyday life. This paper examines three aspects of the book’s environmentally inflected realism in more detail. In response to Adam Trexler’s account of Anthropocene fiction, it begins by examining Lerner’s expansive representation of global commodities and planetary memorial…
Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction
This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demandi…
The Gathering of Form
To critics working on the resonance of environmental issues in culture and literature, the work of Robert Pogue Harrison is an invaluable resource. Originally trained as a scholar of Italian literature, he quickly branched out into different directions, writing a broad study on the role of forests in the Western imagination, entitled Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Published in 1992, Harrison’s seminal work effectively helped to inaugurate t…
Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes
The following essay discusses Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and its evocation of a post-apocalyptic ecology and memory. Drawing on certain insights from Robert Pogue Harrison's work on the cultural role of forests, gardens and the dead ancestor, it sheds light on various enigmatic aspects of McCarthy's novel, including the unspecified cause of the disaster, the future fate of nature and culture, and the elusive final paragraph
Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction
This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demandi…
Introduction
To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategi…
The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape
Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes
The following essay discusses Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and its evocation of a post-apocalyptic ecology and memory. Drawing on certain insights from Robert Pogue Harrison's work on the cultural role of forests, gardens and the dead ancestor, it sheds light on various enigmatic aspects of McCarthy's novel, including the unspecified cause of the disaster, the future fate of nature and culture, and the elusive final paragraph
The Gathering of Form
To critics working on the resonance of environmental issues in culture and literature, the work of Robert Pogue Harrison is an invaluable resource. Originally trained as a scholar of Italian literature, he quickly branched out into different directions, writing a broad study on the role of forests in the Western imagination, entitled Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Published in 1992, Harrison’s seminal work effectively helped to inaugurate t…
Borrowed Time, Borrowed World and Borrowed Eyes
The following essay discusses Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) and its evocation of a post-apocalyptic ecology and memory. Drawing on certain insights from Robert Pogue Harrison's work on the cultural role of forests, gardens and the dead ancestor, it sheds light on various enigmatic aspects of McCarthy's novel, including the unspecified cause of the disaster, the future fate of nature and culture, and the elusive final paragraph
Realism 4°. Objects, weather and infrastructure in Ben Lerner’s 10
A rare example of a contemporary climate-change novel, Ben Lerner’s 10:04 joins reflections on our increasingly unrecognisable planet with a remarkably realist attention to everyday life. This paper examines three aspects of the book’s environmentally inflected realism in more detail. In response to Adam Trexler’s account of Anthropocene fiction, it begins by examining Lerner’s expansive representation of global commodities and planetary memorial…
Planetary memory in contemporary American fiction
This special issue considers the ways in which contemporary American fiction seeks to imagine a mode of ‘planetary memory’ able to address the scalar and systemic complexities of the Anthropocene – the epoch in which the combined activity of the human species has become a geological force in its own right. As Naomi Klein has recently argued, confronting the problem of anthropogenic climate change alters everything we know about the world: demandi…
The Great Displacement
This paper examines how contemporary works of fiction and nonfiction reflect on anticipated cases of climate dislocation. Building on existing research about migrant agency, climate fiction, and human rights, it traces the contours of climate migration discourse before analyzing how three twenty-first-century novels enable us to reimagine the “great displacement” beyond simplistic militarized and humanitarian frames. Zooming in on stories by Mohs…
The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape
Earth Emotions
Reviewed by: Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A. Albrecht Ben De Bruyn (bio) Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World by Glenn A. Albrecht. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. 256 pp. How does life on an increasingly degraded planet make us feel, how should it make us feel, and how can we talk about those environmental emotions in ways that foster more convivial futures? These are urgent questions at the start of the tw…
The Mom and the Many
This article examines Lucy Ellmann's encyclopedic novel Ducks, Newburyport (2019) in the context of debates on modernist legacies, animal characters, and climate fiction. It pays particular attention to the text's signature strategy of including anecdotes about nonhuman creatures exposed to distinct forms of violence, anecdotes that reveal the concerns of the human narrator and her daughter but also highlight other animals, their unfamiliar pheno…
The Everyday Pluriverse
This chapter examines Jon McGregor’s prize-winning novel Reservoir 13 against the background of debates on biodiversity loss and multiscalar fiction, paying special attention to its evocation of a particular rural mesocosm. After reviewing the text’s idiosyncratic participation in the traditions of rural and crime fiction, the analysis explains how the novel redirects the reader’s attention from human to environmental concerns and evokes a multip…
Introduction
To frame this collection of essays, this introduction reviews existing research on sacrifice zones and related concepts, extractivist thinking and regenerative mindsets, and the presence of damaged settings in contemporary literature and literary history. To be more precise, it considers the affordances and limitations of notions such as the extractive zone, the contact zone, and the critical zone alongside attempts to articulate hopeful strategi…
The Webs of Life
Review of: Karen Bakker, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants. Princeton University Press, 2022. 368 pp. $33.00 (hb). and Karen Bakker, Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth. MIT Press, 2024. 288 pp. $29.95 (hb
Art (8 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Environmental ethics (5 works) · History (5 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Archaeology (3 works)