The rise of cli-fi literature in Germany and around the world
A Literature and Cinema Meet Science Workshop
*** see also a graduate seminar being taught at Tufts Univeristy by Prof. Liz Ammons
http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2015/12/tufts-university-dan-blooms-alma-mater.html
Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg, Delmenhorst, Germany 22 - 23 April 2016
''Since global warming seems, almost by definition, hard to imagine (after all, it’s never happened before) it gets short shrift. (…) And here science can take us only so far. The scientists have done their job – they’ve issued every possible warning, flashed every red light. Now it’s time for the (…) artists, whose role is to help us understand what things feel like.''
-- Bill McKibben, in his introduction to ''I’m with the Bears,'' page 3 in the anthology
Novels and short stories that depict research on climate change and/or its ecological and social ramifications have been gaining in prominence. Examples are Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Goods, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, as well as the short story anthology I’m with the Bears. In the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years, novels and movies that deal with climate change are being discussed in the media under the label “cli-fi” (cli-fi.net) and billed as a genre somewhere between the new lab-lit genre and speculative fiction.
Cli-fi has been moving into university curriculums and generating controversial debates about the function of literature and art in the societal reaction to climate change challenges.
From a sociological perspective, we are interested not so much in the question of literary classification as in the (self-)positioning of cli-fi as a boundary genre that picks up literary, scientific, political, and general societal discourses and articulates them in a new way. The self-representations of authors as well as the comments by reviewers in scientific and literary media reveal a literature that actually aims to elucidate scientific knowledge and even attempts to inspire readers to political action. Thus cli-fi serves as a cultural focal point for re-imagining the future socio-ecological consequences of global warming.
On the one hand, cli-fi exhibits patterns typical of any socially engaged fiction, taking socially significant topics and translating them into individualized, emotionally affecting stories in order to evoke such feelings as compassion or indignation. But cli-fi also dramatizes scientific insights that would otherwise remain within the specialized discourses of scientific disciplines or would become accessible to a wider audience only via classical forms of science communication (i.e. science journalism or popular non-fiction). Can these aspects of cli-fi play a role in mediation processes regarding scientific knowledge, and if so how? This question has, to date, received little scholarly attention.
Cli-fi often transcends the traditional divide between the sphere of facts (science) and the sphere of fiction (literature/art).
Whereas “weather” is directly perceivable, climate – and even more so processes of climate change spanning decades and centuries – is only conceivable through forms of narrative. This narrative quality of climate takes on even more significance when it comes to describing the future ramifications of global warming, which is an essential part of climate change debates. Here, both scientists and literary writers have to rely on fictional narratives in order to project the social and ecological consequences of climate change into the future.
Therefore, some scientists have themselves switched to fictional modes of narrative—in at least one case, explicitly so (Oreskes/Conway 2014: The Collapse of Western Civilization)--in order to describe the consequences of climate change on the basis on currently known facts. What sort of crossover is there between these “scientific” and “artistic” fictions, and what similarities and differences do we see, both in the texts themselves and in their effects on readers?
With these events and questions as focal point, this workshop addresses the following issues (the list is open to further proposals):
-- Bill McKibben, in his introduction to ''I’m with the Bears,'' page 3 in the anthology
Novels and short stories that depict research on climate change and/or its ecological and social ramifications have been gaining in prominence. Examples are Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, Ian McEwan’s Solar, Jeannette Winterson’s The Stone Goods, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, as well as the short story anthology I’m with the Bears. In the U.S. and elsewhere in recent years, novels and movies that deal with climate change are being discussed in the media under the label “cli-fi” (cli-fi.net) and billed as a genre somewhere between the new lab-lit genre and speculative fiction.
Cli-fi has been moving into university curriculums and generating controversial debates about the function of literature and art in the societal reaction to climate change challenges.
From a sociological perspective, we are interested not so much in the question of literary classification as in the (self-)positioning of cli-fi as a boundary genre that picks up literary, scientific, political, and general societal discourses and articulates them in a new way. The self-representations of authors as well as the comments by reviewers in scientific and literary media reveal a literature that actually aims to elucidate scientific knowledge and even attempts to inspire readers to political action. Thus cli-fi serves as a cultural focal point for re-imagining the future socio-ecological consequences of global warming.
On the one hand, cli-fi exhibits patterns typical of any socially engaged fiction, taking socially significant topics and translating them into individualized, emotionally affecting stories in order to evoke such feelings as compassion or indignation. But cli-fi also dramatizes scientific insights that would otherwise remain within the specialized discourses of scientific disciplines or would become accessible to a wider audience only via classical forms of science communication (i.e. science journalism or popular non-fiction). Can these aspects of cli-fi play a role in mediation processes regarding scientific knowledge, and if so how? This question has, to date, received little scholarly attention.
Cli-fi often transcends the traditional divide between the sphere of facts (science) and the sphere of fiction (literature/art).
Whereas “weather” is directly perceivable, climate – and even more so processes of climate change spanning decades and centuries – is only conceivable through forms of narrative. This narrative quality of climate takes on even more significance when it comes to describing the future ramifications of global warming, which is an essential part of climate change debates. Here, both scientists and literary writers have to rely on fictional narratives in order to project the social and ecological consequences of climate change into the future.
Therefore, some scientists have themselves switched to fictional modes of narrative—in at least one case, explicitly so (Oreskes/Conway 2014: The Collapse of Western Civilization)--in order to describe the consequences of climate change on the basis on currently known facts. What sort of crossover is there between these “scientific” and “artistic” fictions, and what similarities and differences do we see, both in the texts themselves and in their effects on readers?
With these events and questions as focal point, this workshop addresses the following issues (the list is open to further proposals):
- How do literary narratives influence societal perceptions of climate change (or what is their potential for doing so)? What distinguishes the fictional mediation of scientific knowledge from other forms of science communication?
- What is the position of cli-fi in literary, scientific, and public discourses? How is this position perceived or promoted by the authors, and how is it perceived in different contexts?
- How is cli-fi related to debates that regard climate change as a “grand challenge“ of contemporary society?
- Which narrative and aesthetic strategies are pursued in the literary depiction of climate change? How do such strategies affect non-literary discourses on the future of society?
- Are factual and fictional aspects of the climate change discourse ''reframed'' by cli-fi? How are scientific and literary cli-fi novels and movies related?
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