Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne

Fikcje antropocenu. Literatura XXI wieku wobec katastrofy klimatycznej

Monika Żółkoś — 2022-12-19

This article explores narrative trajectories of conceptualizing climate change in modern literature. The main goal is to extend frames of Anthropocene fiction beyond science fiction genre in novels written in the twenty-first century. Taking humanistic approach to climate crisis as a starting point, the article concentrates on strand of literature based on realistic convention that presents planetary crisis not as futuristic phantasy but as contemporary process. Drawing on the work of Richard Powers, Maja Lunde, Charlotte McConaghy, Barbara Kingsolver, Sigriđur Hagalin Björnsdóttir, and Hanya Yanagihara, I argue that thay create subgenre od climate fiction that present planetary catastrophe in non-spectacular and unconventional way to regain affective power of literature and provoke imagination. Another important aspect is narrative construction of time in their novels, which concentrate on compering different moments in planetary chronology to present human kind as one of many episodes in process of life shaping on Earth and thereby to challenge anthropocentric approach to problem of climate change.

Ecoterrorism in Recent Climate Fiction

Andrew Milner — 2022-12-19

Ecoterrorism is widely discussed – and sometimes practised – by environmental activists, but rarely represented in climate fiction. This essay explores three recent ‘cli-fi,’ novels which do in fact address the issue, one from Finland, one from the US, and one from Australia: Antti Tuomainen’s The Healer (2013), in Finnish Parantaja (2010), Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) and J.R. Burgmann’s Children of Tomorrow (2023).

Anthropogenic Worlds of Transformation and Destruction: Doris Lessing’s Climate Fiction Duology

Kübra Baysal — 2022-12-19

Depicting a world stricken with an ice age in the North and drought in the South, Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann: An Adventure (1999) recounts the survival story of two siblings, Mara and Dann, amidst un/natural and societal havoc. The sequel, The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog (2005) pictures the dramatic transformations both in the nonhuman nature and the protagonists’ lives after the devastating disasters in the first novel. Migrating among thousands of people from the south towards northern Ifrik and passing through desolate lands scorched with drought, 4re, 3ood, and diseases in Mara and Dann, the protagonists mature as they learn to live in a perilous and erratic world populated with survivalists solely focused on personal gain. Through the horrendous picture of an Ifrik parched with drought in the South and frosted with a solid layer of ice at the top north, the novel pictures the helplessness of humankind through Mara and Dann’s quest for life in the face of unstoppable and inevitable environmental calamities. With the melting of the ice in the Northern Yerrup and the flooding in the Northern Ifrik, General Dann delivers Dann’s struggle to cope with his personal loss as the world changes once again, and the climate gets cooler. Obsessed with knowledge and set on to save a library, he races against time, human beings, and the hostile nonhuman environment. In this light, this study aims to analyse Doris Lessing’s climate fiction (cli-fi) duology, Mara and Dann: An Adventure and General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog as climate fiction novels reflecting the destructive impact of climate change on humans and nonhuman nature in the anthropogenic conditions of the fictional world, which is not a far cry from our world in the twenty-first century.

Ekowidmontologia jako strategia lektury. Studium przypadku „Kości, które nosisz w kieszeni” Łukasza Barysa

Mateusz Adam Michalski — 2022-12-19

The article is an attempt to reflect on the relationship between the subject and the environment in a state of crisis on example of the novel by Łukasz Barys entitled The Bones You Carry in Your Pocket. The author proposes a psychoanalytic reading strategy, the main theme of which are ‘spectres’ (Derrida) associated with the traumogenic relationship between the ‘I’ and nature. Be text analyses climate catastrophe in the context of hyperobject theory (Morton) and their entanglement in local structure.

Mycelium Matter(s) – Fictionalizing Human–Mushroom Relations

Vishwaveda Joshi — 2022-12-19

Through this paper, the author tries to explore a simple yet complex question: how do we decentralize the human presence in conversations about climate-change? To do so, this speculative climate 2ction is presented through the non-human narrative perspective of mycelium (fungi). The speculative fiction provides a space for re-thinking our ontological and epistemological strategies and categorizations of nature/culture division, as well as how we understand nature in relation to human.The speculative climate-fiction proposes a reconsideration of human in relation to nature/climate, through fungi. It further explores how sensory, bodily, and multimodal methodologies may work in interaction to produce new possibilities to explore the corporealities of human-nature relationships and how a non-anthropocentric understanding of climate-change can allow for an emerging engagement with a vast mesh of human and beyond-human agencies. Drawing inspiration from Sylvia Plath, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and using Erin Manning’s understanding of a5ect as having a feltness that we often experience as a becoming-with, in this case, a becoming-with nature, the speculative-fiction (SF) is written as a dialogue between fungi and human. The SF also uses artwork created with mushrooms, fungal roots, as well as mushroom extracts, to exaggerate the presence of beyond-human beings in a new onto-epistemic strategy that reconsiders climate change and human–nature relationships.

„Próba generalna” współ-odczuwania z nie-ludźmi w opowiadaniu Olgi Tokarczuk

Szymon Kamiński — 2022-12-19

The work reflects Olga Tokarczuk’s short story Dress Rehearsal which deals with the topic of apocalypse, climatic catastrophe, and climate change. The article is a part of a scientific work, which is a master’s thesis dealing with the complex issue of the subjectivity of animals and nature, as well as the common environment and post-environment, and the study of the relationship between humans and non-humans. In the work, the Nobel Prize winner comes under the influence of a ‘world-creator’ and an ‘intense observer’, thus human relations can be complicated in times of the end of the world and how human attitudes towards animals and the world change. This time of the end, marked by Giorgio Agamben with the messianic era, allows for a certain non-action towards reality, and empathy and compassion begin being a remedy for centuries of objectification of other beings.

O kryzysie klimatycznym z perspektywy nieetnocentrycznej (na przykładzie filmu anime „Nausicaä z Doliny Wiatru” Hayao Miyazakiego)

Anna Filipowicz — 2022-12-19

The article raises the problem of non-Eurocentric approaches to natural disasters – treating them as ordinary rather than traumatic events. For some archaic (indigenous) types of thinking, fundamental changes taking place in the environment do not cause the cessation of relations with nature and involve the need to constantly adapt to its conditions, even at the expense of one’s own welfare or living. Hayao Miyazaki’s anime film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind also discusses this issue. The animistic thinking about the environment (Japanese Shintoism) shown in it opens a reflection on the possibility of considering old worldviews in the reflection on the ethical future of man on the eve of the climate collapse.