Narrative Worldmaking and the Anthropocene
Dr. Erin James
I begin this talk with a basic premise: that narrative and the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch defined by the visible human impact upon the planet’s geology and ecosystems, are both products of humans writing worlds. I thus argue that narratives, at their core, can help us understand how humans write and inhabit worlds, thereby also helping us understand better the irrevocable human writing of an altered real-life, material world in the Anthropocene. I make this claim in three sections. First, I flesh out the connection between the Anthropocene and narratives as records of humans writing and inhabiting worlds in more detail by positioning worldbuilding as essential to narrative. Second, I make a case that this worldbuilding activity is distinctly human, arguing that the anthropogenic nature of narrative mentation provides us insight into how humans—and humans specifically—mentally create and emotionally inhabit worlds in ways that other species do not. I further position narratives as cognitive affordances for worldbuilding that are based upon particular human relationships with their environment. Third, I explore how an appreciation of narrative worldmaking stands to reshape current discussions of narrative in the Anthropocene. I suggest a slightly surprising project: that scholars of narrative and the environmental humanities would do well to study the very texts that rely on assumptions of human superiority and thus task readers with mentally modeling an imaginative world that resembles the real-world contexts we are fast producing. This project involves not only drastically expanding the corpus of texts that environmental scholars study, but also shifting from analysis of explicit representations of anthropogenic climate change in a text’s content to the implicit assumptions, attitudes, values, and behaviors that inform the narrative’s storyworld. I draw upon Edward Said’s model of contrapuntal reading to argue that narratological and environmental humanities scholars have much to gain from reading narratives that do not acknowledge climate change explicitly in their content, as these are precisely the texts that rely upon, circulate, and reproduce damaging attitudes of human superiority that have helped to bring forth the Anthropocene. They are thus vital tools for grappling with the cognitive processes and assumptions that have helped to write the real world in this epoch.
Biographical Note
Erin James joined the English Department at the University of Idaho in 2012. Her book The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives (University of Nebraska Press, 2015) explores the intersections of ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and narrative theory and questions the role narratives stand to play in a response to today’s environmental crisis. Erin has also published essays in The Language of Plants (U of Minnesota Press 2017), the Journal of Narrative Theory, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, The Bioregional Imagination (U of Georgia P 2012), and Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Palgrave 2012). At the University of Idaho, Erin teaches courses on global literatures in English, postcolonial literatures and theory, ecocriticism, and critical theory. She is also the Director of the M.A. in English and the chair of the Ecocriticism Reading Group.
