Transcending Boundaries: The Acousmatic Story in the Anthropocene

The multiple crises of the Anthropocene include a crisis in sto- rytelling. Amitav Ghosh, for example, has claimed that not only is literary fiction incapable of representing climate change, it is also complicit in its concealment in the broader culture (2016). Ghosh suggests the increasing entwining of image and text brought about by the Internet could lead to a hybridity of form that will free readers from the unhelpful logocentrism of re- cent times. While agreeing with him on both the need for new forms and the importance of hybridity, we argue that he has overlooked the power of sound in storytelling. Drawing on a collaborative work-in-progress about birdsong and loss, we propose the acousmatic story as a response to the challenges of the age and also to an emerging understanding that all sto- ries are entangled in a vast mesh of agencies, both human and other-than-human.