Storying the Ecocatastrophe: Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse

How do writers and artists represent the climate catastrophe so that their works stir audiences to political action or at least raise their environmental awareness without, however, appearing didactic? Storying the Ecocatastrophe attempts to answer this question while interrogating the potential of narrative to become a viable political force. The collection of essays achieves this by examining the representational strategies and ideological goals of contemporary cultural productions about climate change. These productions have been created across different genres, such as the traditional novel, dance performance, solarpunk, economic report, collage, and space opera, as well as across different languages and cultures. The volume’s twelve chapters demonstrate that rising temperatures, erratic weather, extinction of species, depletion of resources, and coastal erosion and flooding are an effect of our abusive relationship with nature. They also show that our use of nuclear power, extraction of natural resources and extensive farming, including heavy reliance on pesticides, intersect with intrahuman violence, as fleshed out by heteropatriarchy, racism, (neo)colonialism, and capitalism. They finally argue that human activity has indirectly contributed to other contemporary crises, namely the migrant crisis and the spread of contagious diseases such as Covid-19.

Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is Professor of French at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. In her career, she has lectured at the University of Hull, the University of Queensland, Royal Holloway, and the University of Turku, Finland. She has held the prestigious Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship, the Fernandes Fellowship (University of Warwick), and served as Visiting Professor at the Université Blaise-Pascal in France. Her research on the cultural representations of World War II and the Holocaust has resulted in the publication of the monographs World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (Legenda, 2022). She has edited issues of French Forum, Journal of Holocaust Research, and Eastern European Holocaust Studies, and, with Avril Tynan, has co-edited a collection of essays Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Legenda, 2024). She is currently preparing a monograph on the representations of the forest in Holocaust literature and cinema, and, with David Tollerton, is co-editing a special issue of Holocaust Studies dedicated to the links between genocide and ecocide.

Katarina Leppänen is Professor of Intellectual History and the Head of the Department of Literature, Intellectual History and Religion at the University Gothenburg, Sweden. Her doctoral thesis was on the feminist Elin Wägner and the European feminist movement in the interwar era, especially focusing on issues of alternative social orders and ecological feminist ideas. Leppänen’s research covers question of women’s independent nationality, education for internationalism, and trafficking in women in the interwar era. Her ongoing project deals with the importance of literary transnational, international, and regional exchanges in the Nordic and Baltic countries in the early twentieth century. Titled ’Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature’, the project is funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.