Hyperobject Reading, Scale Variance, and American Fiction in the Anthropocene

2024 Ming Chuan University Research Award

This book proposes a model of reading called hyperobject reading that bridges the Anthropocene scale variance between humans and humanity by focusing on the large-scale problems and phenomena themselves. Hyperobject reading draws on narratology and reader-response theory, as well as newer developments such as the postcritical turn and object-oriented ontology. The theoretical introduction sets out the building blocks of hyperobject reading. Chapter 2 intervenes in critical disability studies and debates about the ecosomatic paradigm; Chapter 3 intervenes in debates about technological evolution, analogue vs. digital subjectivity, and affect theory; and Chapter 4 intervenes in debates about autofiction, contemporary metafiction, and the position and role of the narrator in first-person narratives where the narrator and protagonist can be distinguished. The analytical conclusion sketches the conceptual anatomy of the hyperobject and three possible responses. No part of the Earth today is free from human influence, but literary success suggests effective real-world strategies.

“Ambitious, combative, and brimming with the excitement of discovery, CJ Sheu’s Hyperobject Reading weaves a many-skeined argument that never loses sight of its goal: to show how and why literary fiction matters in the Anthropocene. Its contribution is not only to advance ecocriticism, narratology, object-oriented ontology, or disability studies, but most of all to demonstrate to his readers how intellectually fertile the borderlands between them are.”

—Hannes Bergthaller, Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University, co-author of The Anthropocene: Key Concepts 

“In a world wracked by polycrisis, the challenge is to confront the scale of the problems facing us. Can the hyperobject of climate disaster even be thought? Too often, as Amitav Ghosh has pointed out, the novel has struggled to encompass the sheer scale and speed of planetary systems changing in the Age of the Anthropocene. Some may fear that this signals the end of the novel as a form, or perhaps a retreat away from a novel that engages with the world as it really is—but perhaps what is called for is a realism of catastrophe. Chingshun J. Sheu’s remarkable new book on American fiction in the Anthropocene is both a bold philosophical intervention into the challenge of thinking through and with the hyperobjects of the modern age, and also a nuanced reading of the worlds of fiction we have to hand. Moving across various scales, from the atomised neoliberal subject to the incalculably vast digital field of modern life, the book offers nuanced, theoretically and philosophical rigourous analysis of not just individual novels but of fiction itself. Thus, this book offers not just another set of literary expositions but new avenues for thought recuperating both theory and fictionin the Age of the Anthropocene. It’s easily one of the best books I’ve read on the subject.”

—Dr. Jonathan Greenaway, @TheLitCritGuy 

 

“CJ Sheu’s book does more than offer exhilarating close readings of three recent, important novels by Joshua Ferris, Tao Lin, and Ben Lerner. It provides a narratological-thematic model for approaching recent texts in a way to help them help us cope with insistent “hyperobjects” in our contemporary Anthropocene lives – notably, disability, the digital, global warming, and neoliberalism. This is well-informed, up-to-date criticism with a true concern for “extra-textual,” contemporary life that goes well beyond its initial American corpus. Highly recommended for those grappling with the complexities of Anthropocene existence and hopeful that fiction might help us better deal with our harried lives.”

—Duncan McColl Chesney, Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University, author of Silence Nowhen: Late Modernism, Minimalism, and Silence in the Work of Samuel Beckett

 

“What you are holding in your hands is a precious cargo: it is a kind of balsamic reduction, a distilled meditation on what it means to be alive in our era. It’s also about reading about writing and allowing writing itself be a radically new incarnation of reading. Sheu’s achievement is nothing short of a stellar glimpse into literature’s atavistic origins in pre-literate antiquity: mythic storytelling nourished and propelled forward past the present and into the futureby this critic’s grasp of the stunning new roles of aura, affect and agency in the Anthropocene.

Hyperobject Reading takes us on a vertiginous guided tour of the shimmering impact the denaturing impulse at the heart of humanity’s dominance in achieving an anthropomorphic ideal, that of being self-regulating gods, has on two worlds: the haptic world around us, now popularly known as the Anthropocene, and the imagined world within us, the fabricated literary world of fiction. The fast moving critical train he is conducting has multiple tracks featuring myriad passengers but the basic fuel that fires its engine consists of a binary coupling of two of his most captivating concepts: the immersive reading style which his hyperobject requires, and the innovative proportional harmony he calls scale variance.

The first he charts vividly through several vital contemporary authors, the second he evokes within his own text itself, in which we are invited to actively participate via his poetic take on the prismatic structure of American fiction in our current epoch. Not since Leslie Fiedler’s groundbreaking appreciation of the scene in his 1960 study Love and Death in the American Novel has a culture critic arrived who is capable of fully articulating the core content of our present condition. Sheu is that critic. He pulls all of our thinking into a nebulous but challenging futurespect, in which retrospect and prospect almost collide like linguistic asteroids. Jules Michelet once remarked that each epoch dreams the one that follows, and in our case, Chingshun Sheu has produced a signpost telling us that all our parallel tracks have converged: we have arrived at our final destination.”

—Donald Brackett, author of Yoko Ono: An Artful Life

 

“CJ Sheu’s two vocations, that of a scholar and a critic, are given expression in this book. Its theoretical parts, in dialogue with thinkers across fields, are characteristic of Sheu’s profound learning. The essays of literary criticism are full of Sheu’s grace, wit, and generosity towards the writers he discusses and the readers he addresses.”

—Nicholas Haggerty, former editor in chief of The News Lens International

 

“For my crime books, I ensure that the characters, plot, and setting allmake sense. Hyperobject Reading takes that idea and applies it to fiction written in our current ecological crisis with meticulously close reading. It blew my mind how CJ Sheu links the basics of good storytelling to a way to survive the species-level threat of climate change. Read this before global warming destroys all human life on this planet!”

—Ed Lin, author of the Taipei Night Market crime series

 

Chingshun J. Sheu is Assistant Professor of Applied English at Ming Chuan University. His research focuses on contemporary American fiction, literary theory, narratology, and Alain Badiou. Having published essays on William Gaddis, Orson Scott Card, and Taiwanese author Chang Hsiu-ya, he is also the premier English-language film critic in Taiwan.