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The Short Story and Ecology
  • ISSN: 2043-0701
  • E-ISSN: 2043-071X

Abstract

Juliana Spahr’s generically hybrid ‘Unknown Dragonfly Species’ and Sarah Moss’s composite novel are here read in the light of their textual hybridity and with a focus on their short fiction qualities. Different in form, style and content, the two texts share a confrontation of plots concentrating on social concerns – a group of New York friends, an anonymous ‘they’, in Spahr’s ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’, old and young couples, families, groups of friends on holiday in Scotland in Moss’s – with short texts (chapters in Moss, proper names of endangered species in Spahr) that point to a world beyond the human and that ironically subvert the anthropocentrism and egocentrism that drives many of the characters involved. Read against the backdrop of Ricardo Piglia’s ‘Theses on the short story’, the confrontation of different text types is shown to avoid a one-dimensional focus on human affairs and thus helps to transcend the scope each individual genre – short story, poetry or novel – might cover on its own. Looking at ‘Unnamed Dragonfly Species’ and as textually hybrid environmental short fiction, the article argues how the genre perspective may help to produce scenarios in which the human and the more-than-human worlds permeate each other in ways that presage a poetics for the Anthropocene.

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2024-10-28
2025-12-10
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