Sylvia Mayer

Science in the World Risk Society: Risk, the Novel, and Global Climate Change

Abstract Anthropogenic climate change constitutes one of the major global risks of our time. In spite of widespread scientific consensus, however, climate change discourse is still characterized by controversy. This controversy reflects both a variety of conflicting interests that frame the perception of climate change and a fundamental trend in our age of reflexive modernity: an increased awareness of scientific uncertainty and a loss of trust in scientific authority. It also defines our current cultural moment as paradoxical: societies worldwide are simultaneously characterized by such increased awareness of scientific uncertainty and by reliance on scientific knowledge to a historically unprecedented degree. According to Ulrich Beck, this paradox in part defines what he conceived of as a new manifestation of modern society, the ‘world risk society.’ This essay addresses the fictional contribution to the risk discourse of global climate change. After introducing the role of science in the world risk society and the climate change novel as a fictional risk narrative, it discusses how Susan M. Gaines’ Carbon Dreams (2001) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior (2012) engage with this paradox, how they explore the complex socioeconomic, political, and cultural significance of climate science and the role and experience of climate scientists.

Introduction: 9/11 as Catalyst – American and British Cultural Responses

More than eight years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, literary and cultural studies criticism on “9/11” has predominantly come to the conclusion that the events have not brought about the historical, political, and cultural caesura that many commentators had predicted in the immediate aftermath – and that the Bush administration relied on in its introduction of various domestic and foreign policy measures in response to the perceived national and international security crisis. As David Holloway argues in his ideological history of the representation of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ in the years 2001 to 2006, the notion that 9/11 was a moment of historical rupture is not tenable: Contemporary discussions about the causes and outcomes of 9/11 […] were usually couched in explanatory frameworks, terminologies and styles, which had deep roots in American and Western cultural and intellectual history. At times there was an undeniably strong revisionist current in contemporary thought and culture. Yet wherever one looked in the post-9/11 era what was most striking was the absence of clean breaks. (Holloway 2008, 4) However, what the events of 9/11 did bring about was a catalytic effect, especially in the fields of politics and culture. Holloway’s survey of responses to 9/11 in the political arena, in the mass media, in cinema, literature, photography, and the visual arts is only one illustration of the fact that 9/11 accelerated and reinvigorated discussions and debates that had for quite some time been public issues. In the realm of (inter)national politics, the problem of how to respond to al-Qaida terrorism and transnational Islamist insurgency, for instance, had been a pressing issue all through the 1990s and now gained renewed urgency; in the realm of literature and culture, the debate about the “end of irony” and postmodernism – already losing some momentum at the turn of the millennium – was strongly reenergized in the context of loudly voiced demands to tell the 9/11 experience ‘as it really was.’ Ultimately, in the U.S. as well as in Britain, the catalytic effect of 9/11 has by now produced a large corpus of textual/cultural representations that allow us to identify a variety of aesthetic and thematic responses. In various media and in various genres the challenge to represent and thereby make sense of and contribute to the political and cultural discourses on 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ has been met and

Literature and Environmental Ethical Criticism : Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Texts

Abstract The interest in ethical literary criticism which re-emerged in the 1990s is of particular relevance to the field of ecologically oriented literary criticism. Motivated by a concern for the environment and by the question of how to live an environmentally sound life, its basic goal can be defined as creating knowledge that promotes an environmental ethical stance that in turn triggers processes of environmentally benign social and cultural transformation. The claim – made by moral philosophers and literary critics such as Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty and David Parker – that literary texts can be regarded as a specific mode of moral inquiry because of the imaginative range and formal richness of their language bears a high degree of importance for ecologically oriented literary scholarship. It supports the idea that literary texts which address morally relevant aspects of the human-nature relationship are indispensable sources for a more comprehensive understanding of the human moral experience – more comprehensive in the sense of extending the moral universe towards the inclusion of parts of nonhuman nature or to non-human nature as a whole. Following a brief introduction into key issues of current ethical literary criticism and into the field of environmental ethics, this essay explores New England regionalist texts by Sarah Orne Jewett as sites of inquiry into environmentally relevant moral issues. Jewetts texts were part of the emergence of American environmentalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. They contributed to the environmentalist discourse as it developed in particular in the activities and publications of movements such as the conservation, preservation and humane movements. Analysis of the environmental ethical dimension of her texts reveals that the sources of the contemporary philosophical discipline of environmental ethics can be understood as reaching far back into literary history.