"The Answers Were Everywhere": Everyday Anthropocenes : Objects, Gender and Childhood in Recent Climate Fictions

We are now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch which name aims to highlight the impact that human activity has on Earth. This same human activity, including corporations' influence which promotes an harmful social and economic way of life toward the environment, causes growing concern regarding climate change. This dissertation aims to focus on Stephanie LeMenager’s concept of the everyday Anthropocene in order to analyze what it means to be human, every day, in a climate changed world. It focuses on individual experiences and not on tremendous enviromnental catastrophes. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Edan Lepucki’s California and Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness engage with LeMenager’s concept by “pluralizing” it. The novels represent three different types of everyday Anthropocene: respectively an extreme Anthropocene, a domestic and suburban everyday Anthropocene, and a biological and nature-related everyday Anthropocene. They also share similar dimensions of the concept. The three narratives discuss, in their own way, objects and memories, capitalism and slow violence, gender and family, as well as childhood.