Humanising climate change through climate fiction: A literary examination of New York 2140 (2017) by Robinson and the Drowned world (1962) by Ballard
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Date
2021
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University of Namibia
Abstract
Cli-fi is a neologism that is accredited to Dan Bloom, and it is used to refer to novels, short stories and films whose main focus is on the consequences of climate change (Svoboda, 2016). This thesis employed a qualitative desktop literary analysis and purposively sampled two cli-fi novels, New York 2140 (2017) by Robinson and The Drowned World (1962) by Ballard as they explicitly capture the main theme of this study. The study employed thematic content analysis to analyse gathered data which was systemised into different themes to ease the data analysis and presentation process. Through the ecocriticism theory and the econarratology theory, the study examined how climatic concerns are fictionally expressed in the selected novels, explored the complexity of the relationship between human systems and natural systems as presented through specific environmentally destructive events in the selected cli-fi novels and analysed how cli-fi narratives enhance innovative understandings of the human place in an expanded ecosphere as presented in the selected novels. The study found that in both novels, climate change is “humanised” by the abnormality of growth of humans, animals and plants too, as well as their declining health. Though the identified themes in both novels are similar, each novel expresses each theme uniquely. Under the climatic concern theme in New York 2140 (2017), it was established that climate change is a consequence of human activities on the environment over a long period of time. Contrastingly, in The Drowned World (1962), climate change happens naturally, and humans have to adapt and figure out how to survive the calamity. Future studies are recommended to look beyond written cli-fi narratives and look at, for example, orality and visual narratives to examine humanised climate change. Future studies could also use the Rhetorical Narrative Theory (RNT) to explore the humanisation of climate change in cli-fi works.
Description
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in English Studies
Keywords
Climate fiction