Scaling up the Capitalocene: paratexts, storyworld, and climate change in New York 2140

In response to the representational challenges that climate change poses to narrative, econarratology seeks to forge chains between the storyworld and broader extranarrative contexts. This article argues that paratexts, serving as a liminal zone mediating between the inside and the outside of the text, are well-suited to grappling with the scalar complexity of climate change by expanding the parameters of the storyworld to scale up narrative time and space and by complicating the author–text–reader collectivity. Using New York 2140 (2017) as a case study, the article illustrates how the interplay between the epigraphs and the core text of this novel can foster a collective subject position that evokes readerly engagement and contribute to a scalar extension, which I analyze in dialogue with the spatio-temporal scale compression underlying capitalism’s expansion, particularly drawn from ideas of David Harvey. By including the paratextual dimensions within the ambit of the storyworld of climate change texts, the article helps to extend the purview of what it means for a novel to engage with the trans-scalar collectivity in the Anthropocene.