Final published version, 363 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - About Time!
T2 - The Abyss of the Future and End(s) of Subjectivity in (Climate) Dystopias
AU - Bettini, Giovanni
PY - 2019/12/15
Y1 - 2019/12/15
N2 - As the climate emergency becomes tangible, its intractability within current paradigms suggests the need to envision and enact new “worlds” and forms of subjectivity. This has proven difficult, also in popular culture. In literature and film, dystopia and catastrophe are a frequent resort to narrate a post-climate crisis world. Building on scholarship critical of this tendency, the article zooms in on two dystopian novels, The Water Knife (Bacigalupi, 2015) and La galassia dei dementi (Cavazzoni, 2018), and contrasts the subjective positions these two “nightmares” project onto a future disaster – based on a melancholic mourning of loss, and on a shared condition of lack, respectively. The article argues that, while the former risks resuscitating established ways of “being human” – part of the crises that climate change symptomatizes –, the latter can facilitate imagining new and more just socio-ecological constellations.
AB - As the climate emergency becomes tangible, its intractability within current paradigms suggests the need to envision and enact new “worlds” and forms of subjectivity. This has proven difficult, also in popular culture. In literature and film, dystopia and catastrophe are a frequent resort to narrate a post-climate crisis world. Building on scholarship critical of this tendency, the article zooms in on two dystopian novels, The Water Knife (Bacigalupi, 2015) and La galassia dei dementi (Cavazzoni, 2018), and contrasts the subjective positions these two “nightmares” project onto a future disaster – based on a melancholic mourning of loss, and on a shared condition of lack, respectively. The article argues that, while the former risks resuscitating established ways of “being human” – part of the crises that climate change symptomatizes –, the latter can facilitate imagining new and more just socio-ecological constellations.
KW - Anthropocene
KW - climate fiction
KW - dystopia
KW - imagination
KW - environmental fiction
KW - environmental catastrophe
KW - cli-fi
U2 - 10.4000/eces.4907
DO - 10.4000/eces.4907
M3 - Journal article
VL - 32
SP - 103
EP - 126
JO - e-cadernos CES
JF - e-cadernos CES
SN - 1647-0737
ER -