Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis PDF Author: Gregers Andersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000710130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book

Book Description
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term’s descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term’s speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis PDF Author: Gregers Andersen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000710130
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book

Book Description
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term’s descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term’s speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis

Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis PDF Author: GREGERS. ANDERSEN
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032088792
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book

Book Description
Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis argues that the popularity of the term "climate fiction" has paradoxically exhausted the term's descriptive power and that it has developed into a black box containing all kinds of fictions which depict climatic events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse as well as our apparent inability to avert it, we face geophysical changes of drastic proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the consequences. This book argues that this crisis of imagination can be partly relieved by climate fiction, which may help us comprehend the potential impact of the crisis we are facing. Strictly assigning "climate fiction" to fictions that incorporate the climatological paradigm of anthropogenic global warming into their plots, this book sets out to salvage the term's speculative quality. It argues that climate fiction should be regarded as no less than a vital supplement to climate science, because climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence within worlds not only deemed likely by science, but which are scientifically anticipated. Focusing primarily on English and German language fictions, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis shows how Western climate fiction sketches various affective and cognitive relations to the world in its utilization of a small number of recurring imaginaries, or imagination forms. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies more generally.

Fire and Snow

Fire and Snow PDF Author: Marc DiPaolo
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438470479
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book

Book Description
Fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis may have belonged to different branches of Christianity, but they both made use of a faith-based environmentalist ethic to counter the mid-twentieth-century's triple threats of fascism, utilitarianism, and industrial capitalism. In Fire and Snow, Marc DiPaolo explores how the apocalyptic fantasy tropes and Christian environmental ethics of the Middle-earth and Narnia sagas have been adapted by a variety of recent writers and filmmakers of "climate fiction," a growing literary and cinematic genre that grapples with the real-world concerns of climate change, endless wars, and fascism, as well as the role religion plays in easing or escalating these apocalyptic-level crises. Among the many other well-known climate fiction narratives examined in these pages are Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, The Handmaid's Tale, Mad Max, and Doctor Who. Although the authors of these works stake out ideological territory that differs from Tolkien's and Lewis's, DiPaolo argues that they nevertheless mirror their predecessors' ecological concerns. The Christians, Jews, atheists, and agnostics who penned these works agree that we all need to put aside our cultural differences and transcend our personal, socioeconomic circumstances to work together to save the environment. Taken together, these works of climate fiction model various ways in which a deep ecological solidarity might be achieved across a broad ideological and cultural spectrum. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7137 .

Leila

Leila PDF Author: Prayaag Akbar
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571341330
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Get Book

Book Description
Every year on Leila's birthday Shalini kneels by the wall with a little yellow spade and scoops dry earth to make a pit for two candles. One each for herself and for Riz, the husband at her side.But as Shalini walks from the patch of grass where she held her vigil the man beside her melts away. It is sixteen years since they took her, her daughter's third birthday party, the last time she saw the three people she loves most dearly: her mother, her husband, her child.There are thirty-two candle stubs buried in that lawn, and Shalini believes her search is finally drawing to a close. When she finds Leila, she will return and dig up each and every one.

Imagining the Future of Climate Change

Imagining the Future of Climate Change PDF Author: Shelley Streeby
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520294440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Get Book

Book Description
#NoDAPL : native American and indigenous science, fiction, and futurisms -- Climate refugees in the greenhouse world : archiving global warming with Octavia E. Butler -- Climate change as a world problem : shaping change in the wake of disaster

The Anthropocene Unconscious

The Anthropocene Unconscious PDF Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839760494
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book

Book Description
From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?

Anthropocene Fictions

Anthropocene Fictions PDF Author: Adam Trexler
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813936934
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but criticism of the contemporary novel has not adequately recognized the literary response to this level of environmental crisis. Ecocriticism’s theories of place and planet, meanwhile, are troubled by a climate that is neither natural nor under human control. Anthropocene Fictions is the first systematic examination of the hundreds of novels that have been written about anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on climatology, the sociology and philosophy of science, geography, and environmental economics, Adam Trexler argues that the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. The novel expands the reach of climate science beyond the laboratory or model, turning abstract predictions into subjectively tangible experiences of place, identity, and culture. Political and economic organizations are also being transformed by their struggle for sustainability. In turn, the novel has been forced to adapt to new boundaries between truth and fabrication, nature and economies, and individual choice and larger systems of natural phenomena. Anthropocene Fictions argues that new modes of inhabiting climate are of the utmost critical and political importance, when unprecedented scientific consensus has failed to lead to action. Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Narrating the Mesh

Narrating the Mesh PDF Author: Marco Caracciolo
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813945844
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book

Book Description
A hierarchical model of human societies’ relations with the natural world is at the root of today’s climate crisis; Narrating the Mesh contends that narrative form is instrumental in countering this ideology. Drawing inspiration from Timothy Morton’s concept of the "mesh" as a metaphor for the human-nonhuman relationship in the face of climate change, Marco Caracciolo investigates how narratives in genres such as the novel and the short story employ formal devices to effectively channel the entanglement of human communities and nonhuman phenomena. How can narrative undermine linearity in order to reject notions of unlimited technological progress and economic growth? What does it mean to say that nonhuman materials and processes—from contaminated landscapes to natural evolution—can become characters in stories? And, conversely, how can narrative trace the rising awareness of climate change in the thick of human characters’ mental activities? These are some of the questions Narrating the Mesh addresses by engaging with contemporary works by Ted Chiang, Emily St. John Mandel, Richard Powers, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeanette Winterson, and many others. Entering interdisciplinary debates on narrative and the Anthropocene, this book explores how stories can bridge the gap between scientific models of the climate and the human-scale world of everyday experience, powerfully illustrating the complexity of the ecological crisis at multiple levels.

Wild Romanticism

Wild Romanticism PDF Author: Markus Poetzsch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000380416
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book

Book Description
Wild Romanticism consolidates contemporary thinking about conceptions of the wild in British and European Romanticism, clarifying the emergence of wilderness as a cultural, symbolic, and ecological idea. This volume brings together the work of twelve scholars, who examine representations of wildness in canonical texts such as Frankenstein, Northanger Abbey, "Kubla Khan," "Expostulation and Reply," and Childe Harold ́s Pilgrimage, as well as lesser-known works by Radcliffe, Clare, Hölderlin, P.B. Shelley, and Hogg. Celebrating the wild provided Romantic-period authors with a way of thinking about nature that resists instrumentalization and anthropocentricism, but writing about wilderness also engaged them in debates about the sublime and picturesque as aesthetic categories, about gender and the cultivation of independence as natural, and about the ability of natural forces to resist categorical or literal enclosure. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Romanticism, environmental literature, environmental history, and the environmental humanities more broadly.

Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place

Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place PDF Author: Lenka Filipova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000448819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Get Book

Book Description
The book is an investigation into the ways in which ideas of place are negotiated, contested and refigured in environmental writing at the turn of the twenty-first century. It focuses on the notion of place as a way of interrogating the socio-political and environmental pressures that have been seen as negatively affecting our environments since the advent of modernity, as well as the solutions that have been given as an antidote to those pressures. Examining a selection of literary representations of place from across the globe, the book illuminates the multilayered and polyvocal ways in which literary works render local and global ecological relations of places. In this way, it problematises more traditional environmentalism and its somewhat essentialised idea of place by intersecting the largely Western discourse of environmental studies with postcolonial and Indigenous studies, thus considering the ways in which forms of emplacement can occur within displacement and dispossession, especially within societies that are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, neocolonial exploitation or international pressure to conform. As such, the work foregrounds the singular processes in which different local/global communities recognise themselves in their diverse approaches to the environment, and gestures towards an environmental politics that is based on an epistemology of contact, connection and difference, and as one, moreover, that recognises its own epistemological limits. This book will appeal to researchers working in the fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies and comparative literature.