Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us

Abstract

In this article, Mahlu Mertens discusses the narrative possibilities of representing a »world without us« in Ontroerend Goed's play of the same name for an audience or reader who obviously still exists. In »Negating the Human, Narrating a World Without Us«, she argues that part of the text manages to evoke, through its list-like form, tense, and accompanying rhythm, mixed feelings of sadness and comfort in the face of human extinction - instead of the feeling of 'activist melancholia' often elicited by ecological elegies.