Monika Kaup, New Ecological Realisms

Kaup opens her book with a question about the fate of literary criticism after poststructuralism.Dissatisfied with postmodernism's generalisations that consider every object of inquiry a text hiding an ideological bias (2), Kaup advocates for the recovery of the real.Searching for a proper methodology, she turns her attention to new ontologies (an umbrella term for such approaches as speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, feminist materialism, or ontology of knowledge), for she believes that the ontological turn after poststructuralism offers a solution to Cartesian dualism, capable of bridging the gap between hard sciences and the humanities and reassembling the fragmented vision of reality they provide.Kaup argues that the four approaches she has chosen as the theoretical background for her literary analyses -Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's autopoiesis, Markus Gabriel's ontology of fields of sense, Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of givenness and Alphonso Lingis's phenomenology of passionate identification, and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory -provide a comprehensive lens for investigating the real as they "posit that reality is not found by decomposing things into elementary parts, but by describing patterns, or mapping the way things are organised into ordered ensembles, constellations and configurations" (5).Kaup concludes the introduction by explaining that the novels she has chosen for close reading -all being post-apocalyptic fictions -mirror the ontological shift in theory by reinvestigating the real as a complex system composed of both matter and spirit; she claims that "apocalyptic narrative is a literary variety of a 'systems' vision of the real that demonstrates the irreducibility of integrated wholes" (6).The novels both respond-in a manner all significant post-apocalyptic works do -to very contemporary fears and create alternative visions of the world that call for ontological examination.The first chapter, "New Ecological Realisms and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction," situates the notion of the real advocated by Kaup in the context of the debate among "new realists."Attempting to find an alternative to old materialism's dismissal of non-material phenomena and postmodern constructivism's radical anti-realism, they advocate for realism that accounts for both material objects and mind-dependent constructs without giving primacy to any of them.Although offering slightly different solutions to the matter-spirit dilemma, thinkers discussed by Kaup share the belief that the human subject is

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