Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity

New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Eds. Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann,. Palgrave McMillan, 2020: 99-116., 2020

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.

WIREs Climate Change, 2017

In the last 5 years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature and, correspondingly, in literary studies. Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term cli-fi, or climate change fiction, and speculation that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre. In theater, the appearance of several big-name productions from 2009 to 2011 has inspired an increase in climate change plays. There has been a growing trend, too, of climate change poetry, thanks to the rise of eco-poetry (poetry that exhibits ecological awareness and engages with the world's current state of environmental degradation) and the launch of some key climate change poetry initiatives in the media. This prevalence of climate change literature has brought about a greater engagement with climate change in literary studies, notably the environmentally oriented branch of literary studies called ecocriticism. The increasing number of ecocritical analyses of climate change literature , particularly novels, is helping to shape a canon of climate change fiction. In a separate development, there has been greater interest in the phenomenon of climate change in literary or critical theory (the branch of literary studies concerned with literary concepts and philosophies rather than with literary texts). This development—centered on the study of climate change as a philosophical or existentialist problem—is sometimes termed climate change criticism or critical climate change.

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.

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.

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 [...].

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

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.

2019

International Journal of English and Studies

In the last few years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature. The twenty-first century is considered as an Anthropocene epoch, as unfavourable environmental phenomena are occurring frequently which gradually creates disruption and imbalance in the environment affecting humans at large. Nature which has always been part of literary narratives began to explore these various unpredictable natural crises caused due to human intervention. Writers have glorified the aesthetic beauty of nature once through their narratives, now, they have started to focus their attention on the destruction and imbalance in the environment caused by human intervention through their narratives. These narratives by creating scenarios in the text on coping with diverse challenges and conflicts created by ecological imbalance, awaken the readers to be environmentally conscious of the surroundings. In that sense, climate change fiction affects the collective consciousness of humanity. This article attempts to analyze the text Polar City Red by Jim Laughter for the portrayal of an eventuality due to climate change and attempts to awaken the readers to the unrepresented or underrepresented environmental realities. The paper also proposes to foreground the efforts of the author to bring to the consciousness the responsibility of mankind and their intricate role in the Anthropocene, thereby encouraging them to make a positive change.