Frankenstein's Monster Goes West: Hernan Diaz's In the Distance, Cli-Fi, and the Literature of Limitation

Abstract

Abstract:This essay reads Hernan Diaz's novel In the Distance as both a rewriting of the traditional western (especially John Ford's The Searchers) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in a climate-changed world. Over and against the insistence on transcendence and conquest in those documents of nineteenth-century imperial and technological overreach, In the Distance both formally and thematically conveys an ethos of limitation. By insisting on the exhaustion of former possibilities, the novel provides a new template for climate fiction beyond its current dominant speculative and realist modes.