Subject to passing her internal PhD defence, Ida M. Olsen will be publicly defending her PhD thesis titled “Fictionalizing the Sixth Mass Extinction: Roots, Exclusions, Biases” on Friday 7 October 2022.

Abstract: This thesis explores how contemporary literature in English engages with what has come to be known as the sixth mass extinction, the ongoing extinction event as a result of human activity that is causing a devastating loss of biodiversity not seen since the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Building on existing environmental humanities scholarship, the thesis demonstrates and tests literature’s capacity to complement or counter the spectacular, apocalyptic, and exclusionary modes through which species extinction is often portrayed in popular culture, and thereby to contribute to understanding and ameliorating our dire environmental predicament. Drawing on materialist and multispecies theories, the study pursues two avenues of research: it examines species extinction as both, and simultaneously, a material reality and a cultural discourse. In the first part of the thesis, I investigate how fiction mediates and registers the structural drivers of biodiversity loss, which tend to be neglected in coverage of the extinction crisis. Here, my investigation centres on the link between species extinction and what Nicole Shukin has described as a twofold circulation of animal life under capitalism, where animals are rendered as both disembodied signifiers and as products for consumption. I argue that literature that attempts to dramatize species extinction risks participating in a process I call animal fetishism, i.e., acts that contribute to the dissemination of extinct and vulnerable species as “undying” images and that obscure the historical conditions of their exploitation and endangerment. I further show how whaling fiction can be used to illumine the other side of this process, namely the slaughter and commodification of whales and other animals in what Jason W. Moore has termed the capitalist world-ecology. In such fictional works, the twin endangerment of whales and Indigenous cultures finds formal expression in irrealist narrative styles, as the texts convey the bewildering effects of colonial capitalism’s socioecological destruction. The second part of the thesis probes the web of values, biases, and exclusions that characterizes species extinction discourse. I discuss the issue of taxonomic bias and the fact that representations of endangered species gravitate towards the cute, visible, and charismatic. Specifically, I analyze how authors grapple with the representational challenges of narrating the multispecies complexities of the sixth mass extinction and the vulnerability of non-charismatic creatures such as plants and insects. I also take up the bias towards biological entities and the species category within extinction discourse, and investigate how literature responds to the extinction of non-living entities, such as snow and glaciers, that large-scale environmental change is already engendering. My discussion concludes by considering the limitations of framing and studying species extinction as a problem in isolation from a more holistic environmental context.

The PhD defence will take place in Jozef Plateauzaal (Jozef Plateaustraat 22, 9000 Ghent) from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. CEST and will be followed by a reception at Emmy’s Eats and Sweets (Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 97, 9000 Ghent). If you wish to follow the event online, please contact idamarie.olsen@ugent.be.