Mixed Feelings and Readerly Dynamics in Anthropocene Fiction
The imaginary of climate futures is often split between doom-and-gloom scenarios and techno-optimistic visions. However, the former can prove paralyzing rather than empowering, as psychologists have shown, whereas the latter are based on neoliberal fantasies of continued growth and expansion. This talk argues that the value of climate fiction lies in its ability to question and complicate these binary perspectives on the future. My main example is Jenny Offill's Weather (2020), a novella that deploys formal experimentation as well as irony to defamiliarize the player's engagement with the narrator. Weather blends anxiety, apocalyptic imagery, and a more hopeful stance so as to promise affective transformation, perhaps even catharsis. In the last part of the talk, I survey work in empirical approaches to literature that can yield insight into this type of readerly dynamic.
Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English Literature at Ghent University in Belgium. Drawing inspiration from cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and the environmental humanities, his work explores the forms of experience afforded by narrative in literary fiction and other media (especially video games). Between 2017 and 2022 he led the ERC-funded NARMESH project at Ghent University, which focused on negotiations of the nonhuman in contemporary narrative. He is the author of several books, including most recently Figures of Complexity in Contemporary Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2026). He received the Barbara and George Perkins Prize of the International Society for the Study of Narrative for his 2022 book Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (University of Nebraska Press).
The seminar is open to everyone interested. Welcome!