Storying the Ecocatastrophe

Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse

Helena Duffy, Katarina Leppänen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781040025864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of narrative to become a viable political force. The collection of essays achieves this by examining the representational strategies and ideological goals of contemporary cultural productions about climate change. These productions have been created across different genres, such as the traditional novel, dance performance, solarpunk, economic report, collage, and space opera, as well as across different languages and cultures. The volume's twelve chapters demonstrate that rising temperatures, erratic weather, extinction of species, depletion of resources, and coastal erosion and flooding are an effect of our abusive relationship with nature. They also show that our use of nuclear power, extraction of natural resources and extensive farming, including heavy reliance on pesticides, intersect with intrahuman violence, as fleshed out by heteropatriarchy, racism, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism. They finally argue that human activity has indirectly contributed to other contemporary crises, namely the migrant crisis and the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid-19.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: storying the ecocatastrophe: from doom-and-gloom scenarios to messages of hope
• 1 Daily life and global crisis: human experience and narrative fiction in the age of the Anthropocene
• 2 Feelings of hope and helplessness in Knut Faldbakken’s and Maja Lunde’s climate change novels: an econarratological reading
• 3 Narrating the economic value of nature in the Anthropocene
• 4 Building a new world on the ruins of Helsinki: critical utopia in Annika Luther’s The City of the Homeless
• 5 Extreme climate and the anthropocentric conception of agency in cinematic ocean planets
• 6 The radiant future or the end of history? The (eco)politics of Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus
• 7 The nuclear disaster as metaphor for the impending ecocatastrophe in anticipatory fiction from Luxembourg
• 8 Speculating on ecological futures: narratives of hope and multispecies justice in contemporary ecofiction
• 9 Nature and masculinity in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer: writing an ethical shift in environmental perception
• 10 Backward looking is necessarily organic: female artists revisit traumatic pasts and reimagine present and future alliances
• 11 ‘Ruined and wrecked!’: Annie Proulx confronts the ecocatastrophe
• 12 Congolese Anthropocenes, wounds of extraction, arts of resistance: transcultural materialism in Fiston Mujila’s Tram 83 and Sammy Baloji’s The Beautiful Time
• Afterword: one must cultivate one’s own garden
• Index