Anthropocene Aesthetics: Reading Climate Fiction in the Twenty-First Century (N/A)
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Organization: Moran College
Event: N/A
The proposed edited volume Anthropocene Aesthetics: Climate Fiction of the Twenty-First Century seeks to explore how contemporary literature responds to the planetary crisis of climate change. The term Anthropocene was introduced by the atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, to refer to the current geological epoch where human activity has made an irreversible impact in shaping the systems of the Earth. As the Anthropocene emerges as a defining ecological and cultural paradigm, climate fiction (popularly known as Cli-Fi) has become a vital site for negotiating questions of scale, temporality, responsibility, extinction, adaptation, and multispecies coexistence. It has its challenges, too, in addressing questions on representation.
Writers like Margaret Atwood, Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia Butler, Amitav Ghosh, and Barbara Kingslover have shaped the Cli-Fi with dystopian futures, speculative survival, ecological realism, and climate justice narratives. So, we have an array of realist novels, young adult fiction, graphic narratives, indigenous storytelling, and transnational narratives that highlight environmental precarity and planetary crises. This proposed book seeks to examine how twenty-first-century climate fiction (cli-fi) reshapes narrative form, genre conventions, and aesthetic strategies in response to environmental crisis. Rather than treating climate change merely as a thematic concern, the focus would be on how it transforms storytelling itself—producing new literary forms capable of representing deep time, slow violence, planetary systems, and uneven ecological futures. Therefore, we seek original research articles that explore this reimagined storytelling under conditions of planetary crisis.
Rashmi Buragohain