The first 2023 issue of American journal Utopian Studies contains, in its "Book Reviews" section, my review of the essay Fabuler la fin du monde. La puissance critique des fictions d'apocalypse (2019) by Jean-Paul Engélibert, which details the way in which apocalypse stories have shifted, over time, from being written from a religious outlook to relying on physical and particularly environmental and climatic inspirations. It then shows the different ways in which the first modern apocalypse stories, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, served as forerunners to today's works devoted to climate change and other current issues. Finally, Engélibert's work strives to prove that by creating an imaginary space of post-apocalyptic tabula rasa (a kairos opposed to the chronos of normal pre-apocalyptic life), apocalypse fiction can help generate pragmatic and dynamic thinking on new conditions and the actions to be carried out from a new context, and therefore motivation rather than discouragement, or what Michel Deguy called L'Énergie du désespoir [The Energy of Despair] (1998).

To that effect, Engélibert mainly studies Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville's Le Dernier homme (1805), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Émile Souvestre's Le Monde tel qu'il sera (1846), Didier de Chousy's Ignis (1883), Robert Merle's Malevil (1972), José Saramago's Blindness (1995), Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels (1999), Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), Céline Minard's Le Dernier monde (2007), Davide Longo's The Last Man Standing (2010), Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam novel trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013), the films On the Beach (1959) by Stanley Kramer, Melancholia (2011 ) by Lars von Trier, 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2012) by Abel Ferrara, and Ghost in the Shell (1995) by Mamoru Oshii, the short story “The Machine Stops” (1909) by E.M. Forster, the drama trilogy The War Plays (1985) by Edward Bond, and the first season (2014) of the television series The Leftovers (2014-2017) by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta.

The journal's review on the publisher's website:

https://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_utopian_studies.html

The issue's page on digital platform Scholarly Publishing:

https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian-studies/issue/34/1

Engélibert's book's page on its publisher's website:

https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/fabuler_la_fin_du_monde-9782348037191

This multi-authored collection, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing on August 29, 2023 and edited by Françoise Besson, contains my paper "How Bugs, Monarchs and Trees Shape Human Fate and Experience in Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca and Ruins".

This article focuses on the relationship with the environment (sometimes "anthropocentric", sometimes "biocentric" or at least "lococentric" (notions borrowed from US ecocritic Lawrence Buell)), which is developed in two graphic works that American comics author and cartoonist Peter Kuper created about his stay in Mexico from 2006 to 2008: the real-life sketchbook journal Diario de Oaxaca (2009), and the fictional graphic novel Ruins (2015).

This reflection involves, among other things, an analysis of images, and in particular the use of graphic saturation, particularly on a thematic level (with the role given to animals and plants in general, to “bugs” in particular) in two graphic narratives aimed at immersing the reader in the colorful and vibrant and teeming world of Mexico as Kuper experienced it.

The book’s page on the publisher's website:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-1287-0

Diario de Oaxaca’s page on its publisher's website: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=894  

Ruins’s page on its publisher's website:

https://www.selfmadehero.com/books/ruins

Collective collection of texts on American, British, Irish, Quebec and Filipino literature and TV series (among others). The main dossier, made up of scholarly articles on the theme of societal and civilizational, environmental, economic and political collapse in works of science fiction, horror and fantasy, was edited by Florent Hébert and myself. It is followed by a section entitled "Detours" which includes reviews, small essays, poems and short stories, which was edited by Helen Goethals and James Gifford, and to which Mr. Hébert and I also contributed. Finally, a section of reviews of scientific works on various themes (edited by Nathalie Rivère de Carles and Emeline Jouve) concludes the collection, and includes a review of mine, which is in line with the themes of the other sections. To be published on 25 February 2021.

Back cover: While a variety of future-set science fiction focusing on the effects of climate change (commonly called "climate fiction" or "cli-fi") is developing, more and more voices are being raised, in the scientific community, no longer to prevent a distant apocalypse, but to take notice of a collapse (of climate, biodiversity, energy resources, hence thermo-industrial civilization) already underway. The purpose of this collection is to accomplish part of the technical and anthropological study of this context offered by theoreticians of systemic collapse, or "collapsologists", but to focus specifically on its impact on fantasy, the fantastic and science fiction. The studies featured in this book are about recent works that may have been influenced by the current context of ongoing collapse and about older works that are then re-read in light of the new context. They provide analyses developed from a collapsological perspective, and reflections on the concept of collapse.

The book's page on its publisher's website:

https://pum.univ-tlse2.fr/produit/n-63-dynamiques-de-leffondrement-dans-le-fantastique-la-fantasy-et-la-sf/

The whole issue can be read online, at this address:

https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/7118