What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Realism in the Age of Extinction

Abstract:Where in the realm of the sensible can we locate the impact of large-scale anthropogenic processes on biodiversity? In this article I develop a critical approach I term "biocultural phenomenology," focusing upon the intersection of ecological crisis and literary form. I read psychological and social realisms by Henry James and H. G. Wells for instances of small-scale, granular sensations of widening access to imperial and settler-colonial practices of consumption, prevalent forms of bourgeois sociality, and emerging patterns of feeling. I argue that "everyday" and often mundane feelings that are the focus of dominant strands of historical realism are inextricable from the biocide they produce. This article engages ongoing conversations in environmental humanities and novel studies, current styles of critique, and identifies new possibilities for the history of realism. First, biocultural phenomenology displaces affective responses of mourning and ontological accounts of absence governing conversations about literary form and anthropogenic impacts on nonhuman life. Second, I argue that realist logics in these highly anthropocentric texts that appear superficially unpromising for environmental thought nevertheless bind accounts of phenomenal experiences to emergent systemic behaviors across time. Third, I reframe the critical category of the "everyday" in the history of realism to encompass global multispecies impacts and accreting, complex causal structures across very long timescales.