Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making.
Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present..
What Is Extinction? delves into the development of Last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of Last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies.
Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.
Understanding these extinction events also involves examining What happens when the conceptual and Cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well.
Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty.
What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the Cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.
Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction.
Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making
