Zack Abrams, Postdoc fellow: Environmental Chronotopes, Climate Change, and High North Counter-Narratives in Contemporary Fiction
This project has two main objectives. The first objective entails examining the roles of Nature and climate change in contemporary Nordic and Anglophone novels set in the High North. I will contrast the ways in which novels like Ann-Helén Læstadius’ Stöld (Stolen), and Alice Henderson’s A Blizzard of Polar Bears create literary spacetimes (or “chronotopes”) that play into Arctic master- or counter-narratives of High North Environments, and compare the way in which these authors envision characters reactions to their environment changing.
For the second half of my project, I will apply the Climate Reality Check to just over thirty novels that won the Critic’s, Pulitzer, and Booker Prizes from 2014 to 2024. The Climate Reality Check is a Bechdel-Wallace-inspired test for climate change representation in on- and off-screen narratives. It was designed in 2024 by Professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, members of Buck Lab for Climate & Environment, and the non-profit Good Energy, and asks two questions:
1. Does climate change exist in the story’s world?
2. Do characters know about it?
For this project, I will ask one additional question when examining the novels:
3. If it exists in the story world and characters know about it, do the characters talk about or act against climate change?
Josh Burgoyne, PHD candidate: Paradise Found: Environmental Rhetoric in Old Norse and English Translations of the Vinland Sagas, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga
When confronting quandaries about climate change and the evolving relationship between nature and culture, historical literatures offer a unique window into how people of the past engaged with their environments. The Vínland sagas—Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga—are two Old Norse travel narratives in which landscape plays a central role. The differing terrains of Iceland, Greenland, and Vínland evoke a spectrum of emotions in saga figures: they inspire, terrify, intrigue, unsettle, impress, and even tire, ultimately catalyzing emotional responses that drive the two plots forward.
This project is thus guided by three key questions: How are these human-nonhuman interactions depicted in the original texts? Why might they have been portrayed in this particular way? And how faithfully do various English translations preserve the original ecological language? By compiling a lexicon of verbs used in the sagas to depict human-nonhuman interaction and comparing these constructions across the Old Norse corpus, I aim to shed light on potential medieval perspectives on nature-culture dynamics while simultaneously exploring how these perspectives are preserved in translations meant for a modern, English speaking audience.