Reading novels for their hidden histories of colonial extraction and flows of earthly matter

Metabolic Reading offers a striking new approach to four landmark works of postwar French literature, identifying the ecological histories concealed within their pages. Through close readings of Marguerite Duras’s The Sea Wall, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy, Nathalie Sarraute’s The Planetarium, and Georges Perec’s Things, Thangam Ravindranathan challenges the assumption that avant-garde fiction is detached from environmental change and uncovers the repressed “resourcescapes” they contain.

Developing the concept of “metabolic reading,” Ravindranathan traces the pathways of overlooked substances—biotic, agricultural, and mineral—embedded within each novel. By attending to these material flows and their encryption in literary detail and form, she casts canonical texts as uncanny registers of colonial extraction, mass production, and the intensified circulation of modified matter during the postwar decades. These innovative readings illuminate the novels’ entanglements with what Marxian ecological thinkers today call the metabolic rift: the distorting effects of capital-intensive industrial modernity reorganizing the earth on a global scale.

Reactivating the dormant traces of material history in these works, Ravindranathan brings literary forms to disclose the exploitative processes and disturbed landscapes that sustain their plots and settings. Metabolic Reading reshapes our understanding of modern literature and environmental history, enlivening reading as a haunted memory of the mass upheavals of matter that have formed our selves and world.

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