Ditch Dwellers: Landscapes of Extinction in Beckett and Volodine

This article examines modern and contemporary literature at the nexus of ecological awareness and extinction. It reads works by Samuel Beckett and Antoine Volodine—authors who do something rare in literature by conspicuously placing their heroes in close bodily contact with the ground itself. The continued belief in a fossil-fueled, extractivist paradigm of modernity is contingent upon a blindness to the extinctions it causes and the ravaged landscapes it leaves behind. Dark and disturbing, but also beautiful and bewildering, these works mobilize sediment and sign to challenge radically human exceptionalism and make those realities sink in.