Published Paper Details:

Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land offers a posthuman narrative that reimagines libraries and literature as dynamic, multispecies ecosystems. The paper aims to explore how Doerr's novel transcends traditional anthropocentric storytelling by portraying interspecies and intertemporal connections that highlight the resilience of both human and non-human actors. Through posthuman theory, particularly the works of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Bruno Latour, the paper attempts to examine the novel's treatment of libraries as living, ecological networks that persist across time, geography, and species boundaries. Central to the novel is an ancient Greek text that weaves through multiple timelines, from 15th-century Constantinople to a dystopian future in space, connecting disparate characters and settings through its preservation and transformation. The novel's journey is not merely a human endeavour but one shaped by non-human forces such as animals, plants, fungi, and digital systems. The library is reimagined as a space where knowledge and survival are co-produced by humans, the environment, and technology. The novel's treatment of resilience moves beyond individual endurance to a collective, ecological form of survival, where literature itself becomes a collaborative, life-sustaining force. The paper argues that Cloud Cuckoo Land presents a vision of literature and knowledge as interconnected, evolving entities, offering an ecological and posthuman reconfiguration of identity, agency, and memory.