THE NEW WEIRD A FICTION IN TUNE WITH THE ESTRANGEMENTS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract

Based on the premise that the consequences of the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene, especially those related to global warming, produce extreme events that challenge climate patterns and cause great uncertainty and strangeness for the affected populations, the journalist Thomas Friedman (2010) proposed the use of the term global weirding to designate the current and future conjuncture. Canavan and Hageman (2016), in turn, based themselves on the notion of global weirding to correlate the strangeness and tensions arising from the climate crisis with the cosmic horror presented by the terrible and incomprehensible worlds of weird fiction. Following these authors, this article aims to discuss what aspects of literary form and content enable the Weird, especially in its most recent manifestation, the New Weird, as a category of fiction capable of address the anxieties of the Anthropocene environmental crisis and offer representations for the tensions and affections that it entails.