New Materialism in Nature vs Objects

Leah brings up the fact that in many stories nature is only considered when describing the background, but in a dystopia it has as much agency as the main characters. She then shows how this reflects the real world and how nature impacts all people every day even though they may barely consider nature at all. Since we do not choose to respect the agency of nature and its threat of global warming, dystopian literature can serve to open our eyes to the threat that nature can be.

While my previous interpretation was focused on specific objects and how a lack of respect for them was negatively affecting nature, Leah took a broader perspective to describe how nature had agency of its own. In an examination of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I argued how scavenging for essential resources that kept the protagonists alive day by day showed the agency of individual resources. Leah’s interpretation focused on the weather and instead described how it impacted the characters’ ability to travel and thus to scavenge for resources to survive. These together depict how everything truly has agency to affect people and how this phenomenon can be observed to the extreme with a dystopian environment.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter a Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print.

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