“The world-creating power of narratives”: A Critical Analysis of Fungal Aesthetics and Worldbuilding in Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris Books

Abstract

This thesis critically examines the interconnection of fungal aesthetics and worldbuilding in Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris books through a lens of econarratological theory. Scholars of econarratology, the field of study where ecocriticism and narratology converge, have written about the role of narratives in the intersecting ecological crises of the Anthropocene, and recent years have seen the popularization of fungi as “material bearers of solutions” to these crises (Cecire and Solomon 714, see also Caracciolo; James; Herman). However, as of yet no scholarly attention has been paid to how (speculative) texts of the fungal turn engage with econarratological storytelling methods. This thesis responds to this gap in the scholarly debate by conducting a critical analysis of fungal aesthetics, and the way this aesthetics engages with the interconnection of fungi, narratives, and the Anthropocene. The thesis provides close analyses of the three volumes comprising Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris series, parsing how the characteristics of fungi translate into an aesthetic mode that interrogates the connection between narratives and (story)worlds through formal and affective strategies. Herein, the thesis covers the major narratological dimensions of materiality, time, and space, to address the interconnections between storytelling and the real-world political entanglements of these three dimensions. Overall, the thesis contributes not only to criticism the fungal turn, but also to the field of econarratology by critically evaluating and supplementing understandings of econarratological storytelling methods and their political affordances in the Anthropocene.