Abstract
Douglas Coupland’s site-specific installation Canada House, temporarily erected in 2004 in a house deemed by locals to be a “tear down” in a Vancouver suburb, unwittingly captured the zeitgeist of the era eco-critics and theorists have named the Anthropocene, the age where the future of the climate and the environment are most influenced by human activity. In my article, I examine Coupland’s work from the perspective of new materialist philosophy, with particular attention to what Timothy Morton calls the “hyperobject.” In so doing, I attend to the specific dynamics of the installation as a phenomenon in real time and space, as well as its enduring reality as an artifact that translates specific dynamics of interconnectivity between aesthetic, linguistic, and ecocritical discourse as they relate to space and human/nonhuman relationships.
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© by Julia Polyck-O’Neill, published by De Gruyter
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