My current book project comes out of my doctoral research on the microspaces of the modern novel: the field of the few feet around the body that becomes a focus of 20th c novels of 'late realism'. It claims that novels and novelistic works across the twentieth century use varieties of proximity between characters and world to forge new human-nonhuman relationships. Dwelling in prolonged, often unbearable closeness gives rise to complex planetary causalities of biological violence, infuses everyday spaces with long temporalities, imagines startling microhistories of the twentieth century, and erodes the sovereignty of raced and classed fictional subjects to the verge of indistinction from environments. An early exploration of these ideas was published as "Cultural Theory on the Micro-scale: Roland Barthes's lectures at the Collège de France," L'Esprit créateur: the International Journal of Francophone Studies 55:4 (2015). A condensed version of the final chapter is forthcoming in New Literary History in early 2022 as "What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Early Twentieth-Century Realism and the Sixth Extinction."