ノスタルジアと絶滅のナラティヴ : ポピュラー・サイエンスとポストモダン小説

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“Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected frompeople” (15), writes Susan Sontag in her book of essays, On Photography.Even though this book of essays was published in 1977, originally it began asa single article titled “Photography,” which was coincidentally published inthe same year when the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed. Sontagcontinues, “When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, wetake pictures” (15). For Sontag, nostalgia provokes us to take pictures, and“photographs actively promote nostalgia” (15). What interests me here andin the following discussion is how deeply and paradoxically nostalgia isrelated to the act of depicting environmental phenomena during and after thepostmodern period.In her recent book titled The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boymobserves how Vladimir Nabokov was conscious of the interrelationshipbetween nostalgia and the representation of nature. In his memoirs, Nabokovdescribes an aging swan, which is a sign of death, as “dodo-like.” Boymexplains:By describing his bird as “dodo-like” Nabokov interrupts all the clichésand poetic references to the swans of other time. The detail turns thepredictable swan into a creature of individual memory and anticipatorynostalgia. (280)This “anticipatory nostalgia” is a particular nostalgia for “somethingthat hasn’t happened yet” (280). It is very much like Sontag’s nostalgia,and the image of the dodo is one of the most suitable motifs for studyingthe paradoxical relationship between nostalgia and the act of depictingenvironmental phenomena in the extinction narratives of popular sciencewriters and postmodern novelists.In contrast to the ecological narratives of Darwinian writings, such asStephen Jay Gould’s essays and David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo(1996), which revel in environmental ethics, the anti-Darwinian or parodicnarratives of the postmodernists, such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), whichobsessively deal with the extinctions of homo sapiens and the other species,never connect environmental phenomena with ethics. In this paper, however,I will not argue that there is a serious gap between the extinction narratives ofscientists and postmodernists. I will, rather, emphasize the common groundamong their narratives.
慶應義塾大学日吉紀要刊行委員会の論文

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波戸岡景太
慶應義塾大学文学研究科

ノスタルジアと絶滅のナラティヴ : ポピュラー・サイエンスとポストモダン小説

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