In this chapter, I discuss how the comic book series Providence (2015) by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows highlights ecological and emergent properties in the work of H. P. Lovecraft. I argue that Providence treats the expanded work of Lovecraft—that is, the many different medial manifestations comprising Lovecraft’s heterocosm—as a posthumanist media ecology, in which adaptation operates as an ecological process of individuation.

Today, investments in digital humanities are carried out at many universi-ties all over the world, and research calls that encourage various forms of multidisciplinary database projects, preferably with one foot within the natural sciences and technologically oriented social sciences, are staple goods. The question we must ask ourselves is: How do digital media affect the knowledge production in comparative literature—and in the humanities in general? What new theoretical frameworks do we need to address the digital? What new methods and methodologies are possible? Or can, and maybe even should, we just continue as before?

Based on this challenge, Jonas Ingvarsson’s heuristic arguments in Towards a Digital Epistemology suggest a number of possibilities for the future design of comparative literature and the humanities. The ambition here seems to be that through the digital—as a lens and mode of thought, which Ingvarsson consistently maintains—we afford a new understanding of (and for) comparative literature and the history of the humanities. In short, it is about conceptualizing the technological situation of which we are always already inevitably a part. With ease, at times almost with a cocky elegance, Ingvarsson incorporates an impressive and compelling energy into his argument.

The dark and catastrophic futures of dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction are often perceived of as critiques of late capitalist society, presenting an alternative to the status quo of what Mark Fisher once termed «capitalist realism». However, as these narratives at the same time comport according to the feedback and control mechanisms of genre conventions and popular media franchises, they also reproduce, within the system of genre and franchise structures, the very conditions under which creativity and, in extension, future worlds can emerge. The participatory aesthetics of dystopian and post-apocalyptic YA fiction, in which co-creation of other worlds is integral, here becomes a matter of adhering to the regulatory feedback of a system of control. Hence, the alternative futures presented by critical dys- topias are already lost to the capitalist present. Nevertheless, this paper argues that one possible solution to the lost futures of capitalist realism can be found in the ecological concept of sympoiesis and in a parasitic notion of subjec- tivity. Discussing Scott Westerfeld’s two novels Peeps and The Last Days, it is suggested that the future of, and for, creativity lies in the haunting of parasitic infections.

The ethical and epistemological challenges accompanying representations of the past have been at the center of historiography at least since the days of Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. The artific eof representational forms, as well as the ideological entanglements of the position of enunciation, has always been in conflict with Ranke’s historio- graphical goal of telling the past as “it really was”. In the heyday of postmodernism and in the wake of the so-called linguistic turn, the epistemological and ethical impact of representational forms was widely debated. This paper uses two concepts presented during the postmodernist debates – Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographical metafiction” and Hayden White’s “practical past” – in a discussion of two graphic narratives about the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman’s canonical Maus. A Survivor’s Tale (1991) and Vi kommer snart hem igen (2018) by Jessica Bab Bonde and Peter Bergting. Adapting Hutcheon’s and White’s concepts to a posthumanist and media-ecological conceptuality, in which the worldmaking power of media is highlighted as a co-productive or sympoietic process, the paper “Picturing Pastness. Comics, Media Ecology and Memory in Maus and Vi kommer snart hem igen” shows how the past is not represented, but rather emerges from the embodied participation in the medium as memory technology.