In Other Worlds: Imagining What Comes Next. Introduction (original) (raw)

Marieke WINKLER, Marjolein VAN HERTEN & Jilt JORRITSMA, “Introduction. Narratives and Climate Change: How to Imagine ‘the Realism of our Time’?”, Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties, n°27, “Narratives and Climate Change”, November 2022, 1-5.

Interférences littéraires/ Literaire interferenties, 2022

It was on June 28th and 29th, during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, that an international group of researchers from the humanities, environmental studies, psychology and urban studies came together – necessarily online – for the workshop “Narratives & Climate Change”. The workshop was organized by the Dutch Open University and originated from the universities’ research project Imaginaries of the Future City: Envisioning Climate Change and Technological City Scapes Through Contemporary Speculative Fiction. We, literary scholars, initiated this interfaculty project in 2018, from the observation that narrative fiction – and the genre of speculative fiction in particular – plays an important role in imagining the implications of climate change on urban environments [...].

Eco-Fiction: Bringing Climate Change into the Imagination

2016

As a global population, inclusive of humans, fauna, and flora, we are each subject, though disproportionality, to the risks associated with our planet's changing climate. These changes are largely caused by our unabated expulsion of CO 2 emissions into the atmosphere. Our globalized world and economic activities have largely engendered the burning of fossil fuels. The 2014 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, which means keeping warming below 2°C, we need to achieve emissions scenarios relative to pre-industrial levels. Without such reductions we can expect substantial species extinction, increased food insecurity, frequent extreme precipitation events, continued warming and acidification of the ocean, global mean sea level rise, and more frequent and longer lasting heatwaves. Responding to this means collective action at a global level. In my thesis I ask how the novel can respond to and help us to cognise these demands, as well as to cognise the scale and complexities of climate change, its philosophical and physical implications, and to attend to the particularities of local place whist remaining global in its scope and vision. I argue that climate change gives rise to a new form of novel. My work is primarily concerned with ecofiction and how it can raise consciousness about climate change. I consider that the novel, as a counterfactual narrative, can personalise the issue, create stories so that we have ways to speak about it and enchant us towards an ecological imagining. My thesis begins by discussing the existing genre of popular climate change fiction. This mostly consists of clichéd, post-apocalyptic and hero-orientated disaster narratives. These novels are often predictable and limited in how they can engage the reader with climate change. In my second chapter I look at how climate change affects and alters our language. Certain processes belonging to it lead to a loss of words but also to the production of new words. I examine these themes in

Introduction: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction

The call for papers for this collection on “The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction” arose from concerns about pessimistic assessments, in recent literary criticism, of the novel’s ability to meet the representational challenges posed by the pressing planetary problem of climate change. The contributions to this volume take issue with that pessimism and take stock of the novel’s capabilities.

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.

The Rise of the Climate Change Novel

Climate and Literature, 2019

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.

Climate Change Futures and the Imagination of the Global in Maeva! by Dirk C. Fleck

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.

Fictional depictions of climate change

International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses, 2014

Critical commentary of climate change fiction is often framed around its aesthetic function (is it good literature?) and/or its didactic function (does it change behaviour or attitudes?). We argue that an alternative approach instead might ask what fiction can tell us about the psychology of public knowledge, fear and imagination about a climate-changed future. In a review of the fictional literature we found that as climate change has moved from a primarily scientific concern to being a broader political and cultural issue, fictional representations have also moved from science fiction out into a broader array of fictional sub-genres. In addition to loosely reflecting contemporary science, fictional accounts are increasingly characterised by a sense of hopelessness and a lack of faith in authorities. These fictional trends suggest that while readers and writers are willing to explore and appraise the risk and severity of climate change, there is little evidence of the coping appraisal which is, psychologically, a necessary step in taking action to reduce risk.

Climate Change Fiction

American Literature in Transition, 2000-2010, 2017

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.

Harnessing speculative fiction to reimagine and rewrite our relationships to the climate crisis and the future of our local environments

Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 2024

In this article, we examine the fraught task of doing drama-based work on the climate crisis with youth in schools at a time of increasing climate fatalism. We focus on what a virtual, speculative fiction writing and performance workshop achieved with students in Coventry, Kaohsiung and Bogotá by inviting them to rewrite the futures of local environments. We harness the concepts of agency, memory, desire, repair and care as part of a deeply situated yet expansive aesthetics in which youth can imagine more hopeful futures in their worlds.

Tropes of Contemporary Western Climate Fiction: Drills, Activism and Implications

University of Exeter Masters Dissertation, 2018

This Masters Dissertation studies the tropes of contemporary English speaking Western climate fiction. The 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 include Greg Garrard, Astrid Bracke, Ursula Heise, Rebekah Sheldon and Frederic Jameson. Discussion is orientated towards the efficacy of these tropes as literary constructs within any didactic narrative or social activism.