Decentering the Anthropos: Reflections on Christoph Ransmayr's Early Prose

Abstract

In critiques of the Anthropocene, blame is often placed on technology and science for bringing the planet to the brink of collapse. However, what role have literature and culture played in this? Christoph Ransmayr’s subtly engage with this question, which the author attempts to answer by decentering the human and allowing the literary text itself to speak. This essay analyzes the contribution that Ransmayr’s early prose offers to contemporary ecocritical reflection through a deeply personal and profoundly pessimistic approach that overturns the constructive utopias predicting the recovery of a balance between humanity and the planet through renewed environmental awareness. Instead, Ransmayr theorizes the future salvation of the planet through the necessary but painful erasure of the human.