Anthropoaesthetics and anthroponatures: Green unpleasant landscapes and climate catastrophe in Clare Morrall’s when the floods came
Küçük Resim Yok
Tarih
2020
Yazarlar
Dergi Başlığı
Dergi ISSN
Cilt Başlığı
Yayıncı
Karadeniz Technical University
Erişim Hakkı
info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Özet
Environmental disasters, and societal collapses are part of the unprecedented crises of the twenty-first century. These predicaments inevitably find expression in contemporary British climate fiction (henceforth cli-fi). Cli-fi, broadly speaking, crystallises around the ramifications of drastic climatological alterations, such as drought, acid rain, floods, and desertification. In such imaginaries of climate change, the fixed boundaries of natural and artificial worlds are negotiated, only to suggest a more complex relationship between landscapes and humans. In the context of the literary challenges posed by the Anthropocene as the new “human” era, I scrutinise such complex interrelations between human and nonhuman actors in Clare Morrall’s When the Floods Came (2015). In this posthuman ecocritical analysis, I contend that twenty-first-century British climate change novels deploy flood narratives not just as the very repercussion of climate change, but as cautionary fables of the Anthropocene. For these narratives emphatically highlight both the way that late capitalism and human cultures have manipulated and exploited the “natural” world and the way that humans have based their cultures on an anthropocentric understanding of “nature.” Drawing on Morrall’s climate change novel, the essay will propose that contemporary British cli-fi narratives reveal about the portrayal of an “anthroponature” as the necessary in-betweenness of the natural and the cultural. Anthroponatures, arguably, indicate a relational hybridity, green and dark, human and nonhuman. I approach anthroponatures in When the Floods Came through the prism of ecocritical aesthetics, regarding permeable boundaries between the pastoral vision of a green, idyllic nature and an ugly, horrifying, dark nature. By expanding on contemporary ecotheories about green and dark ecologies, I shall argue that the unlikely places in the novel emerge as an interzone between dark and green ecologies, underlying the anthroponatural transformation of environments and ruins, which constructs an “anthropoaesthetics.” Presenting the novel as a dystopian climate change fiction, this study concludes that When the Floods Came is not only a stunning meditation on anthroponatural ecologies and survival, but also a haunting parable about drastic climate change. © 2020 Karadeniz Technical University. All rights reserved.
Açıklama
Anahtar Kelimeler
Anthropoaesthetics, Anthropocene, Anthroponatures, Clare Morrall, Climate change fiction, When the floods came
Kaynak
NALANS: Journal of Narrative and Language Studies
WoS Q Değeri
Scopus Q Değeri
Q3
Cilt
8
Sayı
15
