종말의 시대와 행성적 감정구조: 『우리는 어둠 속에서 얼마나 높이 닿을까』의 디지털 독해 = Planetary Structures of Feeling in End Times: A Scalable Reading of How High We Go in the Dark

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines Sequoia Nagamatsu’s SF novel How High We Go in the Dark (2022) through a combined digital humanities and literary-theoretical approach, focusing on how the novel imagines disaster, death, and mourning as processes that are technologically mediated and institutionally organized. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s concept of structures of feeling, the article argues that the novel articulates an emergent, twenty-first-century structure of feeling shaped by anticipatory grief and diminished futurity. The novel is set in a hypothetical near future where humanity struggles to cope with a global pandemic and the underlying threat of global warming. Employing a scalable reading methodology, the study integrates lexical and sentiment analyses to trace affective and semantic distributions within the text. The novel’s imaginations for future pandemic and climate crisis are structured by dominant formations that extend contemporary technocratic and biopolitical logics of crisis management, care, and affective governance. Alongside these persist residual cultural forms of familial attachment, ethics of care, inherited practices of mourning, reorganized through the dominant formations under conditions of ongoing catastrophe. In this context, the novel articulates an emergent structure of feeling oriented toward endurance and acceptance — grief is normalized, care is detached from futurity, and new ethics of survival and mourning emerge.