Adeline Johns-Putra, ed., Climate and Literature (2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Global warming epitomizes a paradox in the relationship between humans and climate. Recognizing the anthropogenic causes of climate change also involves recognizing the immense collective human influence on the earth's life system. The prevailing concept of the climate is, however, one in which human bodies and actions, cultures and societies play no significant role. The current "weather-biased understanding of the atmosphere" (Fleming/Jancovic 2011) has uncoupled climate from human experience and forms of life. Yet climate is omnipresent in the history of cultures and their aesthetic, political and scientific representation -as a condition and product of life, as responsible for and a threat to human existence (Hulme 2017). This themed section aims to retrieve case studies, readings, and theoretical reflections on the relations between cultures and climates. While the representation of climate change is currently being reexamined in fictional and nonfictional writing (Clark 2015, Johns-Putra 2018), we would like to broaden the topic to climate representations beyond climate change. This renewed attention to "human climates," we believe, will illuminate vital dimensions of a crisis not only of climate and climate knowledge but of ecological relationships in general.
A Short Pre-History of Climate Fiction
Extrapolation, 2018
The paper argues that contemporary climate fiction is a subgenre of sf rather than a distinct and separate genre for two main reasons: first, because its texts and practitioners relate primarily to the sf "selective tradition"; and, second, because its texts and practitioners articulate a "structure of feeling" that accords centrality to science and technology, in this case normally climate science. Not only is "cli-fi" best understood as sf, it also has a much longer history than is commonly allowed, one that arguably stretches back to antiquity. The paper distinguishes between texts in which extreme climate change is represented as anthropogenic and those where it is represented as theogenic, geogenic, or xenogenic; it also provides a brief sketch of the (pre-)history of stories of anthropogenic, xenogenic, and geogenic extreme climate change.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia, 2017
In the 21st century, a new genre of Anglophone fiction has emerged—the climate change novel, often abbreviated as " cli-fi. " Many successful authors of literary fiction, such as Atwood, Boyle, and Theroux, have contributed to this new genre's efforts to imagine the causes, effects, and feeling of global warming. Together, their work pulls the issue-oriented and didactic approach of activist fiction into contact with the intensive description and site specificity of Romantic nature writing. Cli-fi knits these tendencies together into a description of the effects of a dramatic change in the Earth's climate on a particular location and a vision of the options available to a population seeking to adapt to or mitigate those effects.
Climate Fiction: A World-Systems Approach
Cultural Sociology , 2018
Since the death of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading contemporary sociologist of literature has arguably been Franco Moretti. Moretti’s distinctive contribution to the field has been his attempt to apply Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to literary studies. Although Wallerstein traces the origins of the modern world-system back to the 16th century, Moretti focuses on the much shorter period since the late 18th century. This is also the historical occasion for the initial emergence of modern science fiction (SF). Andrew Milner has previously sketched out an ambitious model of the ‘global SF field’, which identified an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores; longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries; and a periphery comprising essentially the rest of the world. This article attempts to apply that model to the analysis of contemporary climate fiction.
The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Fiction, 2021
Heather Houser considers the conceptual frameworks of a topic that bears on nearly every other chapter in this Companion, contemporary “cli-fi” and ecocritical approaches to current literature. When writers presume transformational climate change as a starting point, rather than an abstract possibility, they narrate an “uncanny valley of familiarity and radical alteration” that extends, accelerates, or alters the logics of the present into near or distant futures of drought, warfare, destitution, and superstorms.
Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2011
This article provides an overview of climate change in literature, focusing on the representation of climate change in Anglophone fiction. It then evaluates the way in which these fictional representations are critiqued in literary studies, and considers the extent to which the methods and tools that are currently employed are adequate to this new critical task. We explore how the complexity of climate change as both scientific and cultural phenomenon demands a corresponding degree of complexity in fictional representation. For example, when authors represent climate change as a global, networked, and controversial phenomenon, they move beyond simply employing the environment as a setting and begin to explore its impact on plot and character, producing unconventional narrative trajectories and innovations in characterization. Then, such creative complexity asks of literary scholars a reassessment of methods and approaches. For one thing, it may require a shift in emphasis from literary fiction to genre fiction. It also particularly demands that environmental criticism, or ecocriticism, moves beyond its long-standing interest in concepts of 'nature' and 'place', to embrace a new understanding of the local in relation to the global. We suggest, too, that there are synergies to be forged between these revisionary moves in ecocriticism and developments in literary critical theory and historicism, as these critical modes begin to deal with climate change and reimagine themselves in turn.
Lucy Munday MA Tropes of Contemporary Western Climate Fiction20200106 53664 gjngp1
Climate crisis is perhaps the most urgent critical collective issue that the contemporary global population faces today. It is therefore a matter of shared concern to imaginatively address these meteorological and anthropogenic issues through such a means as literature. This dissertation investigates the underlying tropes of Western climate fiction and seeks to understand how they may be better used to create awareness and galvanise action for mitigating climate crisis. Using critical and theoretical analyses of predominantly American contemporary novels, this dissertation examines the influence of different literary tropes that are widely used in climate fiction, such as humanitarian extinction, the child saviour and class discrimination. These are complicated through other themes of interest, which include consumerist culture, legacy, religion and the poetics of remains, authenticity and responsibility. Broad tropes of importance to this discussion include urban, wilderness, pastoral and collapse motifs. The themes are explored in conjunction with existentialism, post-structuralism, idealism and morality. Key critics
‘restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS’: Early Twentieth-Century Visions of Climatic Change
Modernist Cultures, 2021
Prompted by Wyndham Lewis's call in BLAST for a ‘USEFUL LITTLE CHEMIST’ to ‘restore to us the necessary BLIZZARDS’, this paper considers the conceptions of climate and climatic change – natural and anthropogenic – that were in circulation in the early twentieth century. Engaging with the writing of scientists, journalists, novelists, and avant-garde polemicists, it examines early twentieth-century iterations of the notion that climate determines culture, the period's awareness of past climatic changes, the theories advanced to explain these changes, and the attitudes taken towards the possibility of human-induced climatic change.