Related Papers
Climate and Literature
Introduction
2019 •
Adeline Johns-Putra
The introduction sets out the rationale for the volume and its three sections. The first section, ‘Origins’, explores some of the fundamental questions arising out of the discursive condition of the concept of climate. The second, ‘Evolution’, pivots on the eighteenth century as a key moment in climate history—the formal codification and longitudinal observation of weather as the basis for an understanding of climate. The final section, ‘Applications’, looks at climate’s status in the literature of the Anthropocene, exploring, in particular, how contemporary concerns around climate and climate change interact with established literary norms, particular those around temporal setting and duration.
Climate and Literature
The Rise of the Climate Change Novel
2019 •
Adeline Johns-Putra
This chapter outlines the emergence of climate fiction and its key modes. It pays particular attention to the extent to which climate fiction has worked within the established conventions of literary realism, meeting the many representational challenges mounted by climate change. While it considers the extent to which realism is able to render the abstract and intangible phenomenon of climate change visible, it argues that there is also a significant body of writing on the subject which turns to alternative forms and narrative strategies in the effort to represent climate change, and manages to overcome some of the limitations of realism. In other words, where climate fiction meets the challenges of representing climate change, it has the potential to provide a space in which to address the Anthropocene’s emotional, ethical, and practical concerns.
Environmental Humanities
Science Fiction and the Risks of the Anthropocene: Anticipated Transformations in Dale Pendell’s The Great Bay
2014 •
Alexa Weik von Mossner
Covering the time span from 2021 to 16000 N.C., Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay chronicles the profound climatic, geological and ecological transformations that California undergoes during these fourteen millennia. Human life becomes unimaginably small on such a time scale, and Pendell responds to that representational challenge by compiling a wide variety of texts that zero in on individual humans at different points in the future rather than offering a continuous story or central character. In a way, that place is taken by the geographical region that is the focus of the narrative and gives the book its title. Timothy Morton has argued that because we live in the Anthropocene we can no longer understand history as exclusively human. Pendell’s “Chronicle of the Collapse” suggests that the same is true for storytelling, offering readers the story of a nonhuman protagonist that changes slowly over time. The result is a highly fragmented narrative that is interesting for what it tries to achieve but at the same time remarkably unengaging. In its distant and distanced rendering of future ecological change and human anguish, The Great Bay is a grave reminder not only of the incalculable risks of the Anthropocene, but also of the basic tenets of realist storytelling.
Paradoxa World Studies in Literary Genres
Climate Fictions: Introduction
2019 •
Alison Sperling
What is climate change literature and why is it important?
Helen E . Mundler-Arantes
Public lecture, University of Western Michigan, 2nd April 2019.
Climate Change Futures and the Imagination of the Global in Maeva! by Dirk C. Fleck
Antonia Mehnert
This article is aimed at making a contribution to the only recently emerging literary criticism of climate change fiction. Facing a global environmental disaster such as climate change requires a departure from an overemphasis on place in ecocriticism. Incorporating ideas from the concept of eco-cosmopolitanism can therefore be helpful for the analysis of literary works dealing with global warming, opening up new planetary perspectives. However, while many climate change novels fall short of engaging with the global, D. Fleck’s Maeva! serves as a counter-example from German science fiction. This article therefore explores the ways in which Fleck’s novel embraces an “eco-cosmopolitan manifesto” as a political vision of dealing with the climatically changed world of tomorrow while showing that this thereby newly created “space” is contested and fragile as interests between the local and the global have to be constantly re-negotiated. Finally, this article also discusses Fleck’s innovative textual approach, which can be read as an attempt at imagineering—creating a manual for critical intervention derived from creative ideas.
JAmIt! - Journal of American Studies in Italy
Understanding the Fabric of the Natural World: The Role of the Collective Protagonist in Annie Proulx's "Barkskins"
2020 •
Leonardo Nolé
Contemporary Anthropocene narratives often choose to engage with large scales of space and time. As a consequence, according to Ursula K. Heise, "the single protagonist may decrease in importance, since epic-style narratives over the last century have tended to shift the major narrative actants from individual human characters to collective and sometimes nonhuman actors." Annie Proulx's latest novel, Barkskins (2016), is a fitting example of this tendency. Despite its commitment to several human characters, Barkskins never forgets about the story of the forest, which in Proulx's words is "the character, the underpinning of life." In this essay, I will explore the role this multifaceted collective protagonist plays in Barkskins' narrative. First, thanks to the many human characters at the center of the plot, the narrative can geographically and historically map people's past and present movements across America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, taking the timber business as an example of the technological and cultural development of capitalism in different parts of the world and its long-term effects. Second, the making of the forest and several indigenous people into central characters enriches and diversifies Proulx's discussion of the human impact on the natural world. Finally, its twofold perspective on the actions of single human beings as well as the impact of humanity as a whole bring Barkskins to raise the question of individual/collective agency vis-à-vis the present environmental crisis.
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism
Flooded Cities in Low Countries Fiction: Referentiality and Indeterminate Allegory in Renate Dorrestein’s Weerwater and Roderik Six’s Vloed
2020 •
Stef Craps
In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in question are not located on the shore but further inland, gesturing towards other meanings and symbolical repercussions rather than towards an engagement with flooding per se. This article examines two contemporary flood novels: Roderik Six's Vloed ("Flood") and Renate Dorrestein's Weerwater. We approach the floods in these novels in terms of indeterminate allegory, examining the contradictory meanings that can be attributed to the radical upheavals recounted in these narratives.
Watermarks: Science Fiction, Mitigation and the Mosaic Novel Structure in Australian Climate Fiction
2019 •
Jason Nahrung
The Earth has entered a new epoch, dubbed the Anthropocene, in which the actions of human beings are changing the global ecosystem in dramatic and potentially catastrophic ways. With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now over 400 parts per million, Earth’s ecosphere is sliding over the edge of irrevocable destabilisation. Australian writers are using speculative fiction and “climate fiction” (cli-fi) to explore possible ramifications for their island nation, and the world, in a future affected by man-made climate change. This thesis employs practice-led research to add to this fictive exploration, comprised of a work of mosaic science fiction and exegesis. Both the creative work and exegesis use a bricolage approach, which has structural resonance with the mosaic and the wide-ranging, interconnected elements of climate change. Likewise, the iterative process of practice-led research shares a thematic parallel with the interrelated structures of the mosaic and climate change. Two core subjects of inquiry underpin the creative work, “Watermarks”: the mosaic novel and science fiction. The mosaic’s interlinked short stories mirror the many interconnected facets that make up global climate change. This format, in tandem with the cognitive estrangement often produced by science fiction (SF), provides an ideal fictional vehicle for exploring possible consequences and responses to climate change. The works of three other Australian writers that use this approach are examined in the exegesis. Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009), Sue Isle’s Nightsiders (2011) and James Bradley’s Clade (2015) demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of this frame. The examination of these works represents a rare comparative study of the mosaic’s value in addressing climate change. Analysis of the three case studies contributed to the narrative direction of “Watermarks” and its balance of dystopian and utopian impulses. Important to this balance was the aim of fostering feelings of empathy and hope in the reader. Feelings such as these help raise understanding and potentially incite a preparedness to act. In this way, the “Watermarks” novel addresses the cognitive dissonance that climate change engenders due to its size in time and space, its problematic complexity and its challenge to capitalism and neoliberalism. Both novel and exegesis argue that combining science fiction and the mosaic novel is a valuable and effective method of creating climate fiction. They further argue that climate fiction presenting a utopian sensibility, such as through evoking plausible mitigation pathways, can encourage proactive responses to the challenges of man-made climate change.
American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010
Climate Change Fiction
2017 •
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
With a focus on the novel, this chapter appraises three major themes that emerged in the embryonic corpus of climate change fiction. The first concerns the denial, avoidance, and acceptance of the magnitude of climate change in the present and recent past. The second presents cautionary fables of the Anthropocene (the current epoch in which humans act as a geologic force), extrapolating current trends into devastated, depopulated and denatured futures. The third advances this implicit rebuke to the present by exploring the eco-politics of resistance, reform and revolution. I conclude by identifying two rising themes for the next decade of climate change fiction: aiding the ongoing transition to life after oil and depicting the amplified global inequalities of climate injustice.
