‘Family territory’ to the ‘circumference of the earth’: local and planetary memories of climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (original) (raw)
2020
Climate change has become a harsh reality of our present times. It is happening here, there, and everywhere unbound by the spatial and temporal dimensions. The vacillating impact of such a global crisis equally demands multiple and concurrent scales in order to accurately comprehend the complexity of the problem. Borrowing the title of my paper from Ursula K. Heise’s book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, where she proposes the concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’, this article aims at reflecting upon the globalization of the present ecocatastrophes, musing upon the local (the experiences of the working class people) and the global scale (Unnatural Migration and thereby extinction of the Monarch Butterflies) impact of the climate crisis. Ursula K. Heise believes that the ‘deterritorialization’ of the local knowledge is not always detrimental rather can open up new avenues into ecological consciousness. Giving consideration to a deterritori...
Conciliation and Consilience: Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour
De Gruyter Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, 2016
This chapter argues that climate change politics is characterized by competing temporalities: "warmists" claim time is running out, while skeptics assert that global temperature rise has stopped. In addition, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) process is yielding diminishing returns in terms of public support for emissions reductions, which suggests a broader approach than the purely scientific is required. The chapter examines the specific contribution of Barbara Kingsolv-er's (2012) Flight Behaviour, which epitomizes both "conciliation" of polarized perspectives in the USA and "consilient" integration of scientific and literary knowledge.
Rethinking Climate Change: Cli-fi Dynamics in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour
This article seeks to analyze Barbara Kingsolver‟s 2012 cli-fi Flight Behaviour where the author carefully blends the fictional and real world climate change predicaments, beliefs and disbeliefs to elaborate the inundated ecocatastrophes. The novel indelibly provides insights rather than concrete solutions to decipher the crisis. Kingsolver‟s notion of instigating such alternative perceptions would help one redraw or rethink the existing beliefs about climate change and also instills the indispensable need for a symbiotic living between the human and non-human world. Besides, Flight Behaviour with the dynamics of cli-fi, not only probes deep into the ecological concerns of the real world but also sheds light on the mysterious interplay of the natural world and humans‟ conflicted hearts. The article also infers that Kingsolver‟s flight toward emotional responses is nothing but a journey heading from ignorance to certainty. Keywords: Cli-fi; Ecocriticism; Ecocatastrophe; Ecoconsiousness; Climate change
Woman and Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour
The Creative Launcher
In today’s modern world, climate change is the most pressing important issue that mankind has to deal with. Backed with scientific evidences, there is no denying in the fact that mankind’s sustainability will be largely dictated by its catastrophic or soothing effects. To take the harsh realities of climate changes head on, every single species on this very earth should put forward its foot forward. It is here where we, the human race in general, must embrace the glaring truths of the day around us and exercise our democratic rights to make a difference in the physical world we live in. And in this noble sphere of activities, women can’t lag behind others. Women also have the knowledge and understanding of what is required to be acquired to challenge the changing environmental circumstances in order to determine practical solutions. But, in the face of the prevailing social environment, they remain a largely untapped resource due to existing biases, including restricted land rights,...
Scholar Critic Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour: A Journey towards Eco Consciousness
Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour (2012) is a clarion call for the forestalled eco-apocalypse-climate change or global warming. Unlike the post apocalyptic novels like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Maggie Gee's The Ice People (1999), Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (2007), Flight Behaviour does not focus on the aftermath of any global disaster. Rather, it concentrates on the growing urgency for the need of a bond with nature. To Kingsolver, not elaborating the catastrophe is one way of focusing on the challenges of interpretation and reception posed by the environmental crisis. In such a way, she offers insight into the exodus Monarch Butterflies, thereby linking their cocritic to the conduct of humans. The present paper aims to focus on the impending effects of climate change, the ignorance of reality, and the challenges in acknowledging the truth about climate change on the basis of individual, environmental, economical, and political grounds.
Nostalgia for the light- climate change and the humanities
Climate change threatens the habitability of the earth, and it is the consequence of human action having turned into a geological force. This is our new human condition, which we have become fully aware of thanks to findings of the earth and climate sciences. In turn, these findings have triggered intense conceptual and methodological debate in the humanities and social sciences. The three books under consideration here are among the most recent contributions to this debate; they take decidedly different perspectives; and they are in (some) dialogue with each other. To discuss them together can serve to shed more light on the ways in which we might most fruitfully address the issue.
Makings of the self and of the sun' : modernist poetics of climate change
2014
This thesis aims to formulate a critical methodology and a poetics that engage with climate change. It critiques the Romantic and social justice premises of literary ecocriticism, arguing that a modernist poetics more capably articulates the complexities exacerbated in anthropogenic climate change. Analysing the form of a range of modernist work, I assess its expression of the human-climate relations at the root of the planet's present state, and trace this work's influence on contemporary climate change poetry. Ecocriticism's topical approaches to nature and the environment have been constitutively unable to grapple with climate change until the discipline's recent synthesis of literary theory, and the emergence of a 'material ecocriticism' informed by developments in environmental sociology, ethics and philosophy. Modernist aesthetics has an array of concerns in common with this critical thinking on climate change, and the reciprocity of the two prompts my rereading here of key modernist texts. T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is seen to reveal civilisation's inability to suppress or surpass its environment; Wallace Stevens's opus exposes the necessarily fictive quality of our relations with nature; Basil Bunting extends Stevens's reconsideration of Romanticism with the diminishment of selfhood and breakdown of order in his poetry; while David Jones's The Anathemata employs the scope of modernist poetics to understand the prehistoric climate change that enabled the emergence of civilisation. I would like to acknowledge the support provided by Ustinov College in the form of several annual awards of a College Scholarship, which covered my residential costs while working on this thesis. Thanks are also due to Dr Jamie Casford, for allowing me to attend the Department of Geography's undergraduate module Global Climate Change, and to John Clegg, who was the first to propose that I consider The Anathemata as part of this project (and who has always provided engaging company). I am very grateful to my mother, Isabel Griffiths, for her invaluable proofreading of the final draft of the thesis and her advice for the bibliography; she and my father, Raymond Griffiths, also provided plentiful moral and financial support along the way, and over many years fostered in me the intellectual aspiration to undertake the project. Dr Jason Harding's comments on a penultimate draft were instrumental in getting the thesis to the final stage, and his thorough and challenging readings of it, in his capacity as my second supervisor, enabled my argument to be more rigorous throughout. I owe the greatest gratitude to Prof. Timothy Clark, whose assiduous and incisive supervision, sensitive direction and sympathetic support were essential throughout the researching and writing of this project. Thanks, finally, to Allison Siegenthaler for much love, support, encouragement and patience; I hope I can now give her some of the time I have long promised her. 1 I will define in greater detail my understanding of nature in my first chapter; however, when I invoke an uninterrogated nostalgic, green vision of the term, I will use the capital-N form, "Nature", as here. 2 Carried out via http://web.ebscohost.com on 16 July 2013; these have increased from nineteen and twenty-six respectively at the time of a similar initial search, 10 March 2010, making a doubling in references to the first and a more than threefold increase in references to the latter. 3 Up from 1,014 in March 2010. Houghton writes that the 'increased amount of carbon dioxide is leading to global warming of the Earth's surface because of its enhanced greenhouse effect' (29). 7 A more explicit and accomplished examination of this co-creation is to be found in Stevens's later 'The Idea of Order at Key West', a poem discussed in my next chapter in comparison with an ode by Basil Bunting (see pp.134-6). 8 A similar elision is apparent in poem XV of Stevens's 'Variations on a Summer Day' (Collected 212-15):
Climate anxiety as posthuman knowledge
Wellbeing, Space & Society, 2023
The American Psychological Association defines 'climate anxiety' or 'eco-anxiety' as a chronic fear of environmental doom (Clayton et al., 2017, p.68 [Glossary]). This paper instead theorises climate anxiety as an emergent form of posthuman knowledge, albeit one that is dominated by vulnerability rather than affirmation. Put this way, the cultivation of ethical relationality through meaningful multi-species encounters holds potential for transforming this vulnerability and alleviating the anxiety. Offering both a reappraisal of early earth-writing by humanistic geographers and an engagement with recent work on 'earth emotions', including notions of 'ecological grief' and 'mourning', the article critically reviews lines of thinkingtogether constituting a new form of posthuman wellbeing studiesthat challenge clinical understandings of climate anxiety by reimagining the purpose and mode of psychological intervention for the futures of earthly wellbeing.
‘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.