This article argues that the museum is a significant trope in contemporary literature that engages with the climate crisis. With its destabilisation of relations between human communities and the ...nonhuman world, the Anthropocene - Paul Crutzen's influential (if controversial) name for the current geological period - troubles conceptual binaries and epistemological categories that are central to Western modernity. Through two case studies, Flights (2007), by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and The Octopus Museum (2019), by American poet Brenda Shaughnessy, I explore how these works use the space of the museum to chart the intellectual, affective, and ethical tensions that underlie our climate-changed times. In these literary figurations of the museum, the things on display - whether they are anatomical parts (in Flights) or textual fragments (in The Octopus Museum) - become the site of radical uncertainty, as well as a probe into the agential efficacy of the nonhuman world. This approach destabilises anthropocentric hierarchies and pushes back against a widespread perception of the post-Enlightenment museum as an institution imparting stable, taxonomically organised knowledge. A comparison with the Museum of Civilisation featured in Emily St. John Mandel's postapocalyptic novel Station Eleven (2014) allows me to bring into view the originality of Tokarczuk's and Shaughnessy's experimentations.
The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. ...Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's
The Echo Maker
), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's
The Cows
), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's
The Man I Became
). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)
Monika Fludernik argued in Towards a Natural'Narratology (1996) that narrative has an "anthropomorphic bias" (9), since it is geared towards the embodied and cognitive make-up of social animals like ...us. ...when narrative theorists such as Brian Richardson and Emma Kafalenos talk about causality in narrative, this concept is primarily understood in terms of human action', a causal connection is seen as probable when it is justified in terms of the beliefs and desires that readers have come to ascribe to the narrative's characters. The first con- cerns (expectations surrounding) human action, particularly the teleological patterning of the characters' goals and desires.4 We can call this 'folk probability,' by analogy with folk psychology, with which folk probability is closely bound up: just as folk psychology is an implicit (and pre-scientific) understanding of how the mind works, folk probability defines the likelihood of a certain outcome based on readers' assumptions about human behavior (as well as their familiarity with literary genres and conventions).5 The second conception of probability is a statistical understanding that brings together abstract concepts and concrete events, the global nature of climate change and its surprising local manifestations (or butterfly effects). Using Ghosh's Gun Island as a case study, this article seeks to reassess the concept of probability in narrative (and narrative theory) in light of the probabilistic nature of climate models. According to Michael F. Dahlstrom, narrative "may represent a method of packaging phenomena into human scale: providing a possible remedy for the problems of communicating a meaningful sense of distant science topics" (13618).
Abstract
Scholarship on literature’s engagement with the climate crisis has frequently highlighted the limitations of the
realist novel vis-à-vis the scale and wide-ranging ramifications of climate ...change. This article reads Laura Jean McKay’s
The Animals in That Country
(
2020
) as a powerful example of how
the cross-fertilization of narrative and poetic forms can expand the imaginative reach of the novel. Through the plot device of a
pandemic that enables human-nonhuman communication, McKay’s novel explores the fragility of nonhuman life in a world shaped by the
violence of advanced capitalist societies. The poetic nature of the animals’ utterances complicates interpretation and draws
attention to the complexities of human-nonhuman entanglement, echoing – and performing through literary form – the ethical
position formulated by Deborah Bird Rose under the rubric of “ecological existentialism.”
Scholars in ecocriticism have frequently argued that the environmental crisis calls for an overhaul of the realist novel, which is inadequate at conveying the global scale and ramifications of ...climate change and related anthropogenic disruptions to the Earth system. In this article, I explore how a centerpiece of nineteenth-century realist fiction, the omniscient narrator, may be reimagined to speak to the imaginative challenges of climate change. As the future becomes fragmented in a multiplicity of alternative scenarios (ranging from local disasters to societal collapse), personal and collective anxieties come to the fore. In my case study, Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel
, the narrator’s apparent omniscience stages the uncertainties of our climate future through an ironic device: knowledge of the catastrophe experienced by the characters is displayed but also withheld from the reader, leading to an ambivalent, and largely unreadable, narratorial stance. Omniscience is thus used to undermine the possibility of affirming human mastery and control over the unsettling events that are playing out in the storyworld. In this way,
demonstrates the realist novel’s ability to open itself up to the weird realities of the climate crisis.
This article focuses on the evocation of children’s experiences in fiction that engages with postapocalyptic scenarios. It examines three contemporary novels from profoundly different geographic ...contexts—Yoko Tawada’s
, Niccolò Ammaniti’s
, and Diane Cook’s
—that evoke a child’s experience of societal collapse in the wake of a catastrophic event. Diverse meanings come to the fore as these novels outline, through child focalization, the relevance of bodily experience, materiality, and reenchantment vis-à-vis the climate crisis and its uncertainties. This discussion shows how formal choices in climate fiction are instrumental in creating an affective trajectory that complicates adult readers’ perception of our collective future. These close readings stage an encounter between the fields of ecocriticism and childhood studies that speaks to the significance of the figure of the child in the environmental humanities: even in literature by and for adults, the integration of children’s perspectives on the end of the world performs important cultural work by questioning and decentering an understanding of the ecological crisis shaped exclusively by the adult (and adultist) anxieties of parenthood.
How can providing
less
textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind
more
transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of ...reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural (‘we’) perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing.
In this article you find the third part of a roundtable on Wolfgang’s Iser legacy with Gerald Prince, Mark Freeman, Marco Caracciolo and Federico Bertoni. In Part III we discuss with Marco Caracciolo ...the common grounds of Iser and cognitive literary approaches and the role of interpration in cognitive literary studies.
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