Is happiness possible in the Anthropocene? If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, happiness is the mark of an accommodation with the future, then what becomes of the possibility of happiness when our planetary relation to the future has become estranged?

This essay considers this question, in relation to two performances staged in the summer of 2021, a site specific piece entitled Beckett in Folkestone, and a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Riverside Studios.

Both pieces, staged as we were emerging from the Covid lockdown and in the midst of ecological and biopolitical crisis, conduct a forensic examination of how it is possible now to share each other’s lives, enter into collective futures, or look forward, like Beckett’s Winnie, to another happy day.

In reading the pieces together, the essay looks to the imaginative forms in which we can encounter happiness, not as an accommodation with the future, but as the expression of a radical hope.

The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

In “Digital Nature,” Lai-Tze Fan adapts Lawrence Buell’s criteria for ecofiction in order to demarcate the emergent genre of “digital ecofiction,” which includes hypertext novels, video games, and other forms of multimedia art. Fan contends that the self-reflexive nature of digital texts like J. R. Carpenter’s The Cape and Eugenio Tisselli’s The Gate fosters in readers/users a critical awareness of their implication in environmental degradation through the use of digital technologies. Fan also suggests that digital ecofiction is well suited to address the challenges of the Anthropocene since it evokes alternative temporalities such as deep time and cyclical time.

The final chapter brings all the book’s threads together. It explores the similarities and differences between the Anthropocene defaunation and the ancient mass extinctions. It investigates how much time we have before we reach the extinction levels of the Big Five mass extinctions. It has been suggested that we should just let the defaunation run its course; but the consequences of that course of action appear dire. But all Is not lost. The fossil record shows that the Earth System is resilient, and if we quickly act to remove the climatic forcings we are creating, we have time to turn the situation around and avoid sliding into another full-blown mass extinction.

One of the underlying arguments of this book is that poetry’s value is bound up in its “negative capability,” in its presentation of complexity. It isn’t that the ambiguity or uncertainty embedded in a poem is part of some devious machination on the part of the poet, but that poetry is founded in a fissure, as the previous chapter show in a variety of ways. This argument comes under heavy pressure in a time of global political and ecological crisis. Never has it been more stupifyingly clear that “poetry makes nothing happen,” as Auden wrote. And never have the deep foundations of poetry seemed so precarious. The importance of nature for poetry is so deep as to be nearly unnoticeable, not only poetry’s reliance on the ideologies of the pastoral, but also poetry’s leveraging its own significance by way of the sublimity of the natural world. What happens when nature is under planetary threat? What is the status of a nature poem well after the death of nature? How might we understand poetry within the context of ongoing ecological devastation? This chapter considers these questions through reading of poems by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort, Ed Roberson, and Juliana Spahr.

Throughout his career, Cormac McCarthy has produced a rich body of literature that examines the complicated and often fraught interactions between humans and the more-than-human world. Encompassing tales about precarity and abandonment, failures of the Western dream to provide new beginnings and new freedoms, philosophical meditations on the limits of human knowledge, and apocalyptic revisions of agency in end times, McCarthy’s writings examine complex entanglements between human and nonhuman characters in an ever-changing material world. His place-based writings reconfigure spatial categories as they unfold across diverse geographical scales that are local, regional, national, transnational, and at times even planetary. Drawing on new developments in materialist ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, this chapter explores how the author engages intersections between economy and ecology; addresses agency across humans, animals, and the more-than-human world; and examines challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Through its depictions of ecology and agriculture, the role of the written word in the conquest of the Americas, and the Great Acceleration resulting from the Cold War global arms race, McCarthy’s writings help readers assess some of the more baffling complexities of our new geologic age.