Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Science Fiction and Future Fantasies
- Collective Climate Action
- Love Letters to the Planet
- 15 Meteorology of Form
- 16 Perspective-Taking, Empathy, and Virtuality in Jorie Graham’s Fast
- Diverse Indigenous Voices on Climate
- Redefining ‘the Real’
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
15 - Meteorology of Form
from Love Letters to the Planet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 March 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Historical Shifts in Climate Consciousness
- Part II Current Issues in Climate Change Criticism
- Part III Ways of Telling Climate Stories
- Part IV Dialogic Perspectives on Emerging Questions
- Science Fiction and Future Fantasies
- Collective Climate Action
- Love Letters to the Planet
- 15 Meteorology of Form
- 16 Perspective-Taking, Empathy, and Virtuality in Jorie Graham’s Fast
- Diverse Indigenous Voices on Climate
- Redefining ‘the Real’
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
This study looks at fiction based in Australia, one of many places severely affected by anthropogenic global warming in the Global South. Texts chosen for this chapter (Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1939), Gabrielle Lord’s Salt (1990), Ellen Van Neerven’s Heat and Light (2014)) understand aspects of global warming as ‘simultaneously real, discursive, and social’, but also as spaces within the larger arc of climatic history that might incorporate sensitivity to non-human agency as felt in Oceania. This chapter incorporates flashes of fictocriticism to integrate the component of animacy that seeks out affective intensities that pass through and between human and non-human bodies. This genre permits writers to foreground personal meditations on the ongoing experiencing of climate catastrophe, and it discloses a space for dialogue between scholarly abstractions and personal ones. The unfolding cultural story that comes from these impulses is one of witness and embodiment that portends representations of climate as an intra-active being.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Climate , pp. 229 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022