Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change

Mertens, Mahlu; Craps, Stef

doi:10.1353/sdn.2018.0007

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…B. Crutzen/Stoermer 2000). 5 Siehe exemplarisch Chakrabarty 2009, Palsson et al 2013, Lövbrand et al 2015, Rickards 2015, Latour 2017, Moore 2017, Neckel 2019 bedeutungslos erscheinen zu lassen (Clark 2012, Mertens/Craps 2018. Die Zeitlichkeit des Klimawandels ist damit eine unhintergehbare und zugleich komplexe Bedingung für seine literarische Verarbeitung.…”

Section: Klimawandeldiskurse Werden Literarisch Reflektiert: Das Phänunclassified

Nichts als Katastrophen? Klimawandel als Herausforderung für die utopische Tradition

Herold

2020

Ecozon@

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Aktuelle klimapolitische Debatten sind von einem apokalyptischen Denken durchdrungen. Auch Bewegungen wie Fridays for Future sind davon geprägt – positive Zielsetzungen bleiben dagegen abstrakt, utopische Bilder einer nachhaltigen Gesellschaft stehen nicht im Vordergrund der öffentlichen Auseinandersetzungen. Ich möchte dafür argumentieren, dass eine Vergegenwärtigung und Fortschreibung der Tradition der literarischen Utopie Potentiale für alternative Zukunftskonstruktionen bieten. Ich möchte der Frage nachgehen, wie literarische Utopien Momente eines besseren Lebens in einer vom Klima verwandelten Zukunftswelt aufzeigen können. Dazu werde ich (1.) aktuelle literaturwissenschaftliche Diskussionen zum sogenannten „Cli-fi“-Boom betrachten. Insbesondere die zeitlichen Dimensionen des Klimawandels erweisen sich als eine beachtliche Schwelle für seine gelingende Literarisierung. Allerdings, so werde ich (2.) darlegen, gründet gerade die Wandelbarkeit literarischer Utopien auf ihrer Fähigkeit, Zeitlichkeit zu modellieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund werde ich (3.) mit Kim Stanley Robinsons New York 2140 einen aktuellen Text analysieren, der die utopische Tradition vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Debatten um Klimawandel und Anthropozän fortschreibt. Ich werde nachzeichnen, mit welchen Strategien es ihm gelingt, individuelle, soziale und klimatische Zeitebenen miteinander zu verknüpfen. Abschließend (4.) werde ich kurz diskutieren, weshalb eine kritische Reflexion der zeitgenössischen Dominanz apokalyptischen Denkens für aktuelle klimapolitische Debatten wichtig ist: Die Fixierung auf potentielle Verwüstungen und überambitionierte Reduktionsziele bergen die Gefahr, dass die derzeit mobilisierten Kräfte allzu schnell frustriert werden und in eine zynische Haltung umkippen.

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Section: Klimawandeldiskurse Werden Literarisch Reflektiert: Das Phänunclassified

Nichts als Katastrophen? Klimawandel als Herausforderung für die utopische Tradition

Herold

2020

Ecozon@

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“…Arguing that it is impossible to fully imagine a future in which one will not exist, Squire, Klein, and Craps et al have identified climate fiction narratives as a venue by which modern humanity can envision and perhaps begin mourning its own future absence. 35 In her 2017 essay "Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity," Rebecca Evan defines climate fiction as a genredefying narrative approach which describes the predicted and imagined consequences of climate change.…”

Section: Contemplating Existential Threats To Archivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dying Well In the Anthropocene

Winn

2020

JournalCritLIS

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Humanities scholars argue that the Anthropocene forces humanity to confront its death as a species. For memory workers, the specter of biological annihilation is accompanied by a more immediate existential crisis: if there will be no one to remember what was, then what will have been the purpose of memory work? This essay reviews emerging literature on archivy’s affective and structural adaptations to climate change alongside speculative futures of memory work in climate fiction. The article argues for Anthropocene archivists to adopt a palliative practice based on transdisciplinary principles of radical care, intentional degrowth, anticipatory grief, and maintenance theory.

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“…Linear narrative cannot account for the multi-scalar temporalities of the Anthropocene where, having altered the climate at the scale of geological time, humanity’s past actions have already caused future disasters about which we, in the present , are able to do very little. As several commentators have observed, we need now to think in ‘the future perfect tense’ (Klein, 2013: 83) if we are to embark upon the kinds of ‘prospective archaeology’ (Mertens and Craps, 2018: 135) that might make narrative sense of the Anthropocene.…”

Section: Posthumanism Fiction and The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the novel form is ill-equipped to conceive of the anthropogenic melding of human into geological time and (with climate breakdown) back again, what sort of cultural forms might be able to withstand this temporal elastication? If, as many commentators have pointed out (Haraway, 2016; Mertens and Craps, 2018; Monbiot, 2017), the question of narrative and storytelling is imperative for political and social mobilisation around the issue of climate change, what posthuman cultural forms are able to reveal to us this imbrication of human into geological timeframes? What narrative systems, moreover, can trace, visualise, diagnose and perhaps even think beyond the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) that the Anthropocene often unevenly – but always impactfully – has already started to enact?…”

Section: Posthumanism Fiction and The Anthropocenementioning

confidence: 99%

“…After all, throughout Here , the comic’s narrative infrastructure invites us to draw connections between what are otherwise distant temporal timeframes. Even though many of these frames are so distant that relations between them seem absurd, we ‘still look for closure and try to connect the frames’ (Mertens and Craps, 2018: 140), playing a narrative game – one that, in the end, resists completion.…”

Section: The Atemporalities Of Herementioning

confidence: 99%

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Apocalypse yesterday: Posthumanism and comics in the Anthropocene

Menga

Davies

2019

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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It is widely recognised that the growing awareness that we are living in the Anthropocenean unstable geological epoch in which humans and their actions are catalysing catastrophic environmental change-is troubling humanity's understanding and perception of temporality and the ways in which we come to terms with socio-ecological change. This article begins by arguing in favour of posthumanism as an approach to this problem, one in which the prefix 'post' does not come as an apocalyptic warning, but rather signals a new way of thinking, an encouragement to move beyond a humanist perspective, and to abandon a social discourse and a worldview fundamentally centred on the human. The article then explores how the impending environmental catastrophe can be productively reimagined through graphic narratives, arguing that popular culture in general, and comics in particular, emerge as productive sites for geographers to interrogate and develop posthuman methodologies and narratives. Developing our analysis around two comics in particular-Here (McGuire, 2014) and Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller et al., 2015)we show how graphic narrative can help us to move beyond the nature-society divide that is rendered anachronistic by the Anthropocene.

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Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change

Cited by 18 publications

References 12 publications

Nichts als Katastrophen? Klimawandel als Herausforderung für die utopische Tradition

Nichts als Katastrophen? Klimawandel als Herausforderung für die utopische Tradition

Dying Well In the Anthropocene

Apocalypse yesterday: Posthumanism and comics in the Anthropocene

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