The Novel, Recycled: On Tom Comitta's The Nature Book (2023)

This essay offers an introduction to the work of Tom Comitta and a reading of their 2023 novel, The Nature Book, a citational fiction composed entirely of nature descriptions copied from other novels. The essay situates Comitta’s experiment in citation in relation to a preoccupation with remediation and appropriation in the work of a number of conceptual writers. With reference to the postcritical and anthropocenic turns in literary studies, the essay then explores how Comitta’s work speaks to contemporary debates in the academy about method, particularly as these debates have engaged questions of ecology.