Climate Fiction: A World-Systems Approach

Abstract

Since the death of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading contemporary sociologist of literature has arguably been Franco Moretti. Moretti’s distinctive contribution to the field has been his attempt to apply Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to literary studies. Although Wallerstein traces the origins of the modern world-system back to the 16th century, Moretti focuses on the much shorter period since the late 18th century. This is also the historical occasion for the initial emergence of modern science fiction (SF). Andrew Milner has previously sketched out an ambitious model of the ‘global SF field’, which identified an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores; longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries; and a periphery comprising essentially the rest of the world. This article attempts to apply that model to the analysis of contemporary climate fiction.

Placing lost intersectional plots in Houellebecq's Anéantir (2022): Race, climate and scandalous textual necropolitics

“…Wampole identifies a use of plants as conceptual tools for 'addressing problems of writerly observation, survival and existential fitness, abjection, proliferation and contingency, rootedness, multiplicity and individuality, time and human finitude' (2019: 218). This and other explorations of questions of ecology and climate (Boulard, 2017;Malone, 2018;Milner and Burgmann, 2018) raise the question of how self-reflexively Houellebecq deploys references to nature, and the extent to which Anéantir's visions of it correspond to what Timothy Morton establishes as 'ecocritique': 'a dialectical form of criticism that bends back onto itself […] permeated with considerations […] such as race, class, and gender, which it knows to be deeply intertwined with ecological issues ' (2009: 13).…”

Editorial Statement: Visions for Cultural Sociology in Uncertain Times

“…Cultural sociologists have demonstrated the centrality of meaning-making for shaping how climate change has, and continues to be, acknowledged (or not), denied, fictionalised (e.g. Milner and Burgmann, 2018), interpreted (e.g. Cremin, 2011) and addressed (e.g.…”

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

“…Piper, ; Bode, ) looks at large‐scale movements such as the historical development of specific types of novels (Bode, ), the emergence of a “global science fiction field” (Milner, ), the systemic dynamics of literary fiction on climate change (Milner & Burgmann, ), and the development of the (post‐)apocalyptic genre (Määttä, ). Sometimes referred to as a “leading contemporary sociologist of literature” (Milner & Burgmann, , p. 1), Moretti became popular due to his ambition to see the “big picture.” However, his belief that distance “is a condition of knowledge” (Moretti, , p. 57) might lead to “naïve representationalism” (Frow, , p. 241), which “misleadingly construes the resulting quantifications as data that are independent of interpretation” (Bennett, , p. 290). Approaching literature as a quantifiable black box driven by underlying laws, Moretti presents a “digitized” form of Marxist reflection theory.…”