Climate, Change, Literature
Maastricht University, 6-7 February 2015
The third Natural History of Memory workshop
<http://naturalhistoryofmemory.wordpress.com/maastricht-3/>
Contact: b.debruyn@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Abstracts
Friday
16.30-17.30: Maps and Narratives
Pieter Vermeulen (Leuven), “Future Readers: Narrative Knowledge in the Anthropocene”
This presentation interrogates two of the key figures of the Anthropocene imagination: the
future archeologist and the future historian. If the former will be left to read mankind’s
geological footprint after its extinction, the latter will (less dramatically) chronicle historical
errors that will turn out not to have been fatal; if the former embodies a mode of reading
without understanding, the latter is still a recognizably human subject. These figures recur in
contemporary American fiction (from Teju Cole’s Open City to Max Brooks’s World War Z), but
also in, for instance, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western
Civilization, and in theoretical work on the Anthropocene. I show how these figures convey
anxieties and desires unleashed by the radical reorganization of knowledge production in the
present, most notably the altered relations between power and knowledge, and, drawing on the
narratological work of Mark Currie, how they point to the role of narrative in apprehending the
reorganization of sensibility that we call the Anthropocene: not mainly as a device to impose
continuity and meaning, but, as a way of inhabiting the present as the object of a future memory.
Annika Richterich (Maastricht), “Mapping the Anthropocene: Maps as Tools of Climate
Change Projections”
This paper explores intersections between science and fiction dealing with the impact of climate
change. Novels approaching the future unfolding of the Anthropocene bring together fictional
characters and scenarios with scientific climate projections. While the notion of ‘fiction’ may
seem problematic when it comes to issues such as climate change and global warming, literary
works can in fact take a crucial role in illustrating their geographic and socio-cultural
consequences. This paper analyses in particular how maps may illustrate such scenarios caused
by climate change. It will incorporate ‘maps in fiction’ as well as ‘maps of fiction’. Maps in fiction
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are cartographic visualisations which are added to a literary piece as part of its publication. The
paper addresses the function(s) of such maps in fiction which are concerned with the
implications of climate change. Maps of fiction are analytic tools which allow for distant
readings (Moretti, F. 2013, Distant Reading, Verso) of literary works. The paper shows how
maps of fiction can be used to illustrate and project future effects of climate change. It will
explore intersections between maps in/of fiction and the use of maps in climate change
campaigns, such as the esri story maps (http://tinyurl.com/mdecp8s). It will discuss how
(literary) maps can function as tools for imagining and illustrating the impact of climate change.
Likewise, it points out which frictions may have to be taken into account due to ongoing
controversies concerning the issue at stake.
Saturday
9.30-10.30: Unhuman Histories
Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths), “American Climate Change Fiction and Memory Studies”
In climate change fiction there is an increasing turn towards the future anterior – the
dramatization of that which will have been – in the literary imagination of near-future scenarios
of catastrophe and post-catastrophe. Whether the future emplotted is (post-) apocalyptic and
characterised by socio-economic and ecological collapse and species extinction, or one of
resilience, adaptability and sustainability, or somewhere in between, these fictions stage
cultural memories of the Anthropocene and so an aetiology of the conditions that are imagined
in the future but which are unfolding in the present of this literature’s production and
consumption. While the future anterior gives narrative presence to that which is subject to
cognitive dissonance if not disavowal, these literary projections reveal the ways that memories
of the Anthropocene are mediated – typically what such texts reveal is a melancholic attachment
to life lived under a fossil-fuelled capitalist modernity – and thereby gesture towards the politics
of climate change and its ideological reconstruction. What the future anterior reveals, then, are
the humanist enclosures (Cohen) and disclosures of literary memory. The challenge to the
theory and practice of cultural memory in representing climate change lies in the derangement
of the scales (Clarke) of the humanist imagination in tracking the multiscalar dynamics of
environmental mutation, across time, space, species, and matter, in thinking the miscibility of
nonhuman and human systems. With this in mind, this paper draws on the future imaginaries of
recent climate change fiction (for example, Smith, Rawson, Lepucki, and Rich) in exploring the
horizons, humanism and post-humanism of their ecologies of memory.
Stef Craps (Ghent), “Proleptic Mourning in Climate Change Fiction”
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Climate change, arguably the greatest global challenge of our time, is usually treated as a strictly
scientific phenomenon; however, it also has a cultural dimension. Literature has been struggling
to adequately represent the vast scale (both spatial and temporal) and complexity of the climate
crisis, which evades sensory apprehension and pushes the limits of the human imagination, and
with which established genres seem ill-equipped to deal. The last two decades, and especially
the last few years, have seen the publication of a spate of literary texts—often grouped together
under the rubric of “cli-fi” or “climate fiction”—that adapt, transform, or reinvent conventional
modes of representation in an attempt to capture and communicate the nature, causes, and
consequences of climate change and the urgency required to address it. In this paper, I aim to
explore one strategy for grappling with the problems posed by a warming planet that is often
deployed in such fiction, and which Greg Garrard has described as “proleptic mourning”: a
tendency to mourn, from the perspective of the future, a catastrophe that has not yet (fully)
happened. Found across a wide range of cli-fi—including such works as Naomi Oreskes and Erik
M. Conway’s fictional future history The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future
(2014), Franny Armstrong’s film The Age of Stupid (2009), and David Mitchell’s novel The Bone
Clocks (2014)—proleptic mourning sensitizes readers or viewers to the enormity of the losses
they, or their descendants, will face if the current state of affairs continues. Paradoxically, then,
proleptic mourning mourns future losses in order for these losses not to come to pass in the
first place. Rather than being privatizing and depoliticizing—common criticisms of the work of
mourning—it springs from a utopian urge to ward off the imagined catastrophe by making
readers or viewers feel ashamed about their continued inaction and inviting them to think
about how they could prevent such a calamitous outcome. I will further examine the specificity
of proleptic mourning as a representational strategy in cli-fi by drawing on the work of such
thinkers as Judith Butler, Seth Moglen, and Timothy Morton.
11.00-12.30: (Post)National Climates
Agnes Andeweg (Maastricht), “Ploughing the “Inky Waves”: The Flying Dutchman and the
Sea as Archive”
The legendary Flying Dutchman is the captain of a ghost ship doomed to sail the world seas
forever. Adaptions of the Flying Dutchman story, of which there have been many ever since the
publication of the first versions around 1800, show him now as a Romantic wanderer or a
blasphemous Christian, now as the sailing equivalent of the Wandering Jew, a slave trader or a
competitive capitalist. The ghostly Dutchman is a revenant and as such an instance of memory:
often a memory of the Dutch colonial past. A constant element – in every meaning of the word –
in all these versions is the sea, which/who is an active contributor to the disasters a meeting
with the Flying Dutchman announces, as the story has it. Responding to Steven Mentz’ recent
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call for a ‘blue humanities’ (Mentz 2009), in this paper I aim to analyse the functions and
meanings of the sea as working in tandem with the ghostly Dutchman in various 19 th century
adaptations of the legend. By comparing a number of different adaptations by British and Dutch
authors such as Thomas Moore, Thomas Hood, John E. Banck and J.J.A. Goeverneur, I want to
develop an understanding of the ways the destructive powers of sea and Dutchman destabilize
easy oppositions between material and supernatural, between natural and human, and between
setting and character. Thus the sea as agent and archive comes into focus as a mediator of
memory, connecting the forces of nature and the forces of history.
Isabel Hoving (Leiden), “Bones, Buried Deep: The Anthropocene as the Frame
for Memory and Identity in Caribbean Writing”
The motif of human bones, buried deep in the soil, runs through a series of literary texts written
by Caribbean women writers in the last two decades (notably Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat,
Olive Senior). While the motif can easily be read as a reference to (post)colonial violence,
memory and trauma, it can also be interpreted within an ecocritical frame: the bones testify to
the deadly violence at the heart of both human society and the non-human environment. These
texts suggest that pragmatic, local, environmentalist action is the most productive way to
counter this inescapable violence. Such a reading, however, while valid, would neglect the
manner in which these texts evoke glacial time as the necessary context for the understanding
of the postcolonial, global present. In my paper, I will argue that this Caribbean focus on glacial
time (resonating with Wilson Harris’ interest in the cosmic) is an insightful response to the need
to rethink the temporalities of globalisation. In addition, I will discuss the question whether the
contemporary interest in the concept of the Anthropocene in the humanities can be explained as
a response to the complexities of globalisation and postcoloniality—and to what extent that
response is productive, or not.
Jessica Rapson (King’s College), “Geopolitical Journeys in the Post-Apocalyptic West:
Manifest Destiny and NBC’s Revolution”
In a phenomenon many commentators interpret as a response to 9/11, the last ten years have
seen an increase in representations of sublime post-apocalyptic landscapes in US TV and Film.
Whilst these dramas show imagined high-risk futures, as Mathias Nilges suggests, they “do not
represent the future per se but rather a future return to the past”, for it is in the past (albeit
“nostalgically idealized”) that we “locate the solution to present problems”. Such a return in the
face of decline and destruction is a key trope in NBC’s recent two season series Revolution, in
which, 15 years after electricity has mysteriously disappeared, characters armed with swords
and crossbows travel via horse and steam train in a quest to turn the power back on. Examining
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the landscapes and journeys that structure Revolution’s narrative, this paper demonstrates ways
in which this version of the future explicitly and deliberately apes the course of Westward
expansion under the banner of manifest destiny. Simultaneously reinscribing and interrogating
naturalized founding myths of American geopolitics, Revolution also poses questions about the
role of American originary ideology in a globalized 21st century world characterised by acute
battles for sovereignty over decreasing natural resources.
14.30-16.00: Urban Environments
Axel Goodbody (Bath), ‘Aesthetics in the Anthropocene: Coal Mining in Charles Dickens’
Hard Times and Volker Braun’s Bottomless Sentence’
In his essay ‘Visualizing the Anthropocene’, Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that mainstream visual
culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aestheticised pollution and thereby masked
the detrimental effects of urban growth and the industrial revolution. He describes the
(capitalist) ‘anthropocenic aesthetic’ as an ‘anaesthetic’, which served on the whole to
naturalise and legitimise anthropogenic environmental destruction. However, Mirzoeff
simultaneously notes the complexity and ambivalence of artistic responses to social and
environmental change, and admits the possibility of an anthropocenic ‘counter-aesthetic’
enabling the viewers of works of art to see the damage being inflicted by ‘reclaiming the
imagination’. My paper examines and compares two literary accounts of coal mining (a key
factor in anthropogenic environmental change). The first, Dickens’ classic novel Hard Times,
portrays life in ‘Coketown’, an industrial city in northern Britain in the middle of the nineteenth
century. In the second, a work of poetic prose by Volker Braun written on the eve of the collapse
of East Germany’s socialist experiment, the author revisits the open-cast brown coal fields
whose exploitation had served as a metaphor for constructing the socialist society in his earlier
work. I ask to what extent these respective critiques of capitalist and communist energy
production exemplify an anthropocenic counter-aesthetic. To this end, I examine the ecological
concerns which they express, but also the shortcomings and ambivalences which emerge in
their interpretation of the social and environmental consequences of coal mining. The causes,
remedies and visions of alternatives which they offer are considered. Also the degree to which
coal mining stands for a problematic relationship with the natural environment in general, and
to which it reflects anxieties about contemporary politics and human nature itself, challenging
notions of modernity and progress. The aesthetic structuring of the texts through metaphors,
allusions to cultural narratives and adherence to genre conventions is reviewed critically, in
order to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their respective writing strategies as vehicles
for communicating insights into ecological relations to the public.
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Véronique Bragard (Louvain-la-neuve), “Wastelands: Memory, ‘Garbology’ and Ethics in
Figurations of Dumping Sites”
This paper will examine several cultural productions that revel in the wasteful such as Don
Dellilo’s Underworld, Silko’s Ceremony, Thompson’s Habibi, Khadra’s L’olympe des Infortunes. It
will explore the ‘garbology’ of these sites as they expose the memory and dangers of our
modernity. Waste, as a sign, a marker, becomes a site of memory of our modes of existence
while paradoxically pointing to its limits. As our stories accumulate, new meanings emerge from
dumped objects. This paper will look at the intersection that waste occupies: between the
geographical and the temporal, between utopias and dystopias, as garbage objects assert the
presence of the past, which it paradoxically attempts to erase.
Astrid Bracke (Amsterdam), “Urban Landscapes of Loss and Mourning: A Twenty-First
Century Nature Aesthetics”
This paper explores the ways in which new British nature writings are creating a twenty-firstcentury nature aesthetics. They do so in various ways: by looking anew at traditional
landscapes, using the human and nonhuman traces left in them, as well as by (re)discovering
non-traditional, often urban, landscapes and the role these play in contemporary conceptions of
nature. I discuss this nature aesthetics against the background of both ecocriticism's
problematic relationship with urban environments, as well as the attention urban studies
scholars have begun to pay to urban nature over the past decades.
Specifically I will focus on two works of new nature writing, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons
Roberts’ Edgelands (2011), and Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk (2014). In both of these nonfictional texts landscapes are experienced explicitly as sites of memory and loss, as well as
inscribed with memory and loss: in the case of Farley and Symmons Roberts the memories of
childhood adventures at the edges of cities, and in the case of Macdonald the sudden loss of her
father. Both works also reconceptualise twenty-first-century perceptions of and relations with
nature: Edgelands constitutes, as the authors argue, a plea for England's new wilderness – not
manicured, or distant, but messy, immediate and literally on the edge, and in between the cities
and the countryside. Edgelands are places in which the human and the nonhuman intersect, and
mesh: canals, wastelands, landfills. In H is for Hawk Macdonald intersperses the aftermath of her
father's death, and her subsequent depression, with her experience of training a young
goshawk. It is also a history of human encounters with hawks, a history of the wild, and of
Macdonald's own attempts to become the hawk, followed by her eventual return from the wild.
Both works challenge traditional conceptions of the wild and wilderness, and by doing so make
available a new way of imagining and talking about wildness that is more suitable to
contemporary environmental circumstances. Edgelands and H is for Hawk utilize memory and
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loss as ways of defining contemporary human-nature relations, that are indeed defined by
memory and loss, but every bit as much by the changing balance of the civilized and urban on
the one hand, and the natural and wild on the other.
16.30-17.30: Posthuman Imaginations
Lucy Bond (Westminster), “‘Forget What It Means to Be Human’: Memory, Subjectivity,
and Representation in Contemporary Fiction and Theory”
Through an analysis of Joshua Ferris’s (2010) novel, The Unnamed, this paper charts the search
for a cultural and critical imaginary able to attend to the amnesiac processes of abstraction that
render suffering human bodies and polluted natural environments abject waste products of
contemporary life. In so doing, I draw upon recent scholarly interventions, which contend that
the crises of the twenty-first-century (terrorism, war, climate change, and inequitable global
capitalism) impel a historical and ontological recalibration of the category of the human. Whilst
Butler (2004) warns that inattention to the radical precarity of all life has ensured that the
“humanities have lost their moral authority”, Nixon (2009) indicts orthodox accounts of
modernity for their failure to recognise the accretive “slow violence” engendered by industrial
capitalism, and Cohen (2012) cautions that current modes of “mourning theory” are inadequate
to the task of conceptualising the complex imbrication of human and non-human environments
that inform the era of climate change. For each of these critics, the work of reimagining “the
human” is intrinsically tied to questions of memory and representation. However, Butler, Nixon,
and Cohen approach this triumvirate from disparate, even oppositional, perspectives.
Attempting to reconcile the contradictions inherent in these theories, this paper develops
emergent discourses in memory studies to foreground the invisible dynamics that shape human
experience in the early-twenty-first-century, asking how we should remember and represent
the subject's concomitant vulnerability to violent interpersonal relations, interpellation by the
forces of global capitalism, and implication in multiple human and non-human domains.
Ben De Bruyn (Maastricht), “Menagerie Music. Capturing Animal Sounds in Birch and
Ledgard”
One of the ways in which the contemporary novel contributes to our understanding of
environmental problems is its complex if largely overlooked representation of animal and
natural sounds. Focusing on the history of captive animals, this paper examines several literary
‘recordings’ of zoos, comparing their rich accounts of animal vocalization and silence with their
portrayal of human speech. The paper begins by contrasting the use of animalizing and
humanizing sounds in the fiction film Rust and Bone (2012) and the documentary Blackfish
(2013), two recent explorations of ‘killer whale’ accidents and the joint captivity of humans and
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other animals under precarious capitalist conditions. Similar humanizing and animalizing
strategies are present in Carol Birch’s historical novel Jamrach’s Menagerie (2011), a rewriting
of Moby-Dick and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in which the capture of a Komodo dragon
and the forced consumption of human meat play crucial roles and in which the contrast
between dehumanizing and rehumanizing uses of manmade cages help to explain the rich
tapestry of animal sounds. Turning to another historical novel, the final section concentrates on
J.M. Ledgard’s Giraffe (2006), a work that highlights the structural parallels between the
physical captivity of a group of giraffes and the mental incarceration of several characters by
Communist ideology. Although this story again features many animal sounds, its importance
also derives from its emphasis on silence and the ways in which giraffes seemingly refuse to
establish sonic contact with other species. Documenting the sounds of various animal species,
including humans, these novels offer a particular, sonic type of cultural memory in a global
culture with an increasingly homogenized soundscape.
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