June Bumgardner, "To Love a Breaking World: Mediating Climate Crisis, Compassion, and Grief in Contemporary Literatures"
As the climate crisis creeps forward we experience many gradual losses: the passenger pigeon, the slowdeaths of reefs and rainforests, of communities, of stable weather patterns, and of the senses of place they inform. As things deteriorate, their old forms and the processes of their decay are recorded, modeled, thus used to (re)mediate our senses of loss, informing our imaginations of climate change/crisis. As part of a wider scholarly project of building affective, present-situated paradigm for understanding the creeping climate crisis indebted to theorists like Donna Haraway (Staying with The Trouble), Lauren Berlant, Deepesh Chakrabarty, Glenn Albrecht, and Terry Harpold, this critical-creative paper focuses on the feelings evoked by images of environmental decay and loss, asking how mediations aestheticize our temporalities of climate change/crisis and how we can improve those crisis mediations to engender climate joy and compassion in a changing world.
I begin by thinking about temporalities of crisis, moving towards a speculative, queering temporality wherein the present is caught up in a grief-laden, soon-to-be-always-already approaching future incident-horizon. I then explore how mediations of changing ecologies work within our temporalities, using specific examples of documentation (the passenger pigeon, Eastern Australian temperate forests, and Gauley mountain). Finally, I examine how those mediations are registered through three works of climate resilience literature: a speculative fiction video game Kentucky Route Zero, Ann Pancake’s watershed novel about disaster in rural West Virginia Strange As This Weather Has Been, and a speculative essay by Trans Caribbean writer Gabrielle Bellot “Starshift.” In my analyses, I ask how we can love a world as it fractures, and how to best mediate, record, and enable that love, working towards an imagination that liberates our crisis vision from the guilt, confusion, and anxiety about crises, and can instead focus on caring through them.
Kelsie Crough, "Abjection in Area X: An Eco-Psychoanalysis of Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer"
Jeff Vandermeer’s 2014 eco-fiction and sci-fi horror novel, Annihilation, works to reshape the public understanding of the environmental crisis as an external, material that humanity must physically solve and shifting that understanding to include the crisis psychological, nearly existential impact it has on humans. Vandermeer achieves this shift in perspective on the crisis through the horrifying and unsettling setting of Area X in which his adventuring party of characters enter, try to understand, fail to understand, and come out changed—if they come out at all. Characters who survive Area X returned changed, not physically, but mentally, and readers see this mental change in the narrator as the story goes on and she increasingly encounters more and more of Area X’s creatures and landscape. This change occurs because the characters are facing something, in this case Area X as a living setting, known as the abject.
According to Julia Kristeva’s essay “Approaching Abjection,” the abject is a psychological phenomenon that people encounter that is not part of themselves, yet not part of the other or an object outside of themselves, but something entirely different that stands opposite of the person and upsets everything that person understands as true. This is true of Area X for the adventurers in Annihilation, in which characters question their own motivations, capabilities and even language through encounters with different parts of Area X.
Vandermeer uses Area X as a manifestation of the abject and, by having his characters encounter it, hands the reader uncomfortable questions about the environmental crisis, human life, and what it means for the environment to affect humans in the same detrimental ways humans affect the environment.
Lauren Rudewicz, "S/care Tactics: Tending to Entanglements Haunting Environmental Literature”
As the writers of Haunted Nature, ed. Sladja Blazan, have shown, entanglements haunt environmental literature. Narratives of entanglement in environmental literature are intended to inspire action in response to crisis, underscoring an urgent need to mitigate humans’ planet-sized capacity for harm (and being harmed) in the Anthropocene. These narratives, however, leverage feelings of fear, shame, and overwhelm that are ultimately contrary to action. Entanglement thus becomes itself a crisis in and for environmental literature, often more horrifying than it is inspiring. Building on the case Blazan makes in Haunted Nature for viewing environmental crisis through the lens of horror and the “Ecogothic,” I compare narratives of entanglement in environmental literature with the trope of the porous and multiple self of psychological horror. Although the nature of the fears here are similar, the meta-narrative concerning where these fears come from and what kinds of responses they inspire are importantly different. Environmental literature focusing on entanglement tends to take for granted the connection between the fear it generates and the action it encourages. Theorizing this gap between fear and action, I consider the “failed readers” environmental literature projects – ones who fail to be moved to action because they must not be scared enough, or ashamed enough, or simply don’t care enough. How might the narrative structures of psychological horror reframe this supposed failure?
While I approach this question in part through literary analysis, my paper is also interwoven with personal narrative, in acknowledgement and exploration of the fact that my analysis of the environment through psychological horror has been intimately shaped by my encounters with real-life psychology and experience with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy during graduate school. I consider how IFS might further frame a liberatory reading practice which challenges and re-interprets received narratives of entanglement and the environment.
