Subsurface

"Considering a renewal of life that would begin in the subsurface of the earth, Karen Pinkus deftly navigates between nineteenth-century literature and current issues in geology, critical theory, and philosophy. Digging into the past to imagine a sustainable future, written with spark and wit, Subsurface is a welcome contribution to the environmental humanities."—Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvard University

"A truly geologic, stratigraphic criticism of and for the multiple layers and ages of climate change. Karen Pinkus’s work forms the critical bedrock of environmental and energy humanities. Here, she goes underground, surveying a classic range of subterranean narratives and their striated formations across time and space, fusing with other realms of knowledge that climate challenges literature to uncover. Pinkus's critical alchemy mines novel seams, peels back undiscovered layers of texts and meaning, and cracks open new possibilities for reading narrative within and against the challenges of climate's unfolding futures. Tunneling back and forth from the crucial century of Verne and the rise of geology to contemporary debates over geoengineering, carbon sequestration, and extractivism, she explores carbonizing economic theory and assesses the strange formations of climate finance en route. Subsurface reassesses the grounds of and for literature and literary criticism as resource and method to confront our age of earthbound and atmospheric crisis, mapping its unruly domains, its shifting terrain and hidden impacts. This is exactly the kind of nonconformist analysis we need to navigate climate's deep and complex resonances."—Graeme Macdonald, University of Warwick