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Johannes Stripple

Johannes Stripple

Associate Professor | Senior Lecturer | Principal Investigator BECC

Johannes Stripple

Narrating climate futures : shared socioeconomic pathways and literary fiction

Author

  • Alexandra Nikoleris
  • Johannes Stripple
  • Paul Tenngart

Summary, in English

In parallel with five new scientific scenarios of alternative societal developments (shared socioeconomic pathways, SSPs), a wide range of literary representations of a future world in which climate change comes to matter have emerged in the last decade. Both kinds of narrative are important forms of “world-making.” This article initiates a conversation between science and literature through situating, relating, and comparing contemporary climate change fiction to the five SSPs. A parallel reading of the SSPs and the novels provides the means to make links between larger societal trends and personal accounts of climate change. The article shows how literary fiction creates engagement with climate change through particular accounts of agency and focalized perspectives in a different way than how the factors important to challenges of mitigation and adaptation are narrated in the SSPs. Through identification with the protagonists in literary fiction, climate futures become close and personal rather than distant and abstract.

Department/s

  • Environmental and Energy Systems Studies
  • Department of Political Science
  • Comparative Literature
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate

Publishing year

2017-08

Language

English

Pages

307-319

Publication/Series

Climatic Change

Volume

143

Issue

3-4

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • General Literature Studies

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0165-0009