Contemporary American Risk Fiction
Final Report Abstract
The project brought together the perspectives of ecocriticism and science fiction/utopian fiction studies to develop a methodology for understanding global catastrophic risk within the broader field of literary and cultural studies. Contributing to the field of American Studies in particular, the four subprojects interconnected the study of climate change narratives and technological risk narratives, and the study of risk in different media and genres – in order to establish risk fiction as transmedial hyper-genre and to contribute to the body of knowledge on the aesthetics, poetics, and ethics of global catastrophic risk more broadly. The project thus situated itself at the interface of literary studies, sociology, cultural geography, and science studies. More specifically, the project conceptualized risk as an analytical category for the transmedial study of literature, comics, and films that engage with the uncertainties and contingencies caused by “manufactured” global environmental and technological risks. In a series of workshops, conferences, and several essay publications, as well as two monograph manuscripts, the project members developed the concepts of “risk scenario” (adapted from technology assessment) and “riskscape” (from cultural geography) for use in textual analysis. These two concepts served as a conceptual point of connection between the subprojects, providing a methodology and theoretical framing for the transmedial analysis of risk fiction. A structured database of primary texts and key concepts served to aid collaboration within the project. Sylvia Mayer’s and Lukas Büttcher’s work on US climate change novels as risk narratives further specified the genre concepts of “risk narrative of anticipation” and “risk narrative of catastrophe.” Both explored the aesthetics and ethics of risk fiction, developing a definition of the environmental risk narrative based on the temporalities and spatialities of climate risk. Their work contributes in an original way to what Stephanie LeMenager has called “the struggle for genre” in climate fiction scholarship and shows how climate change novels engage with environmental, scientific, social, economic, political, and cultural implications of living in the world risk society. Jeanne Cortiel, Laura Oehme, and Sebastian Müller analzed global catastrophic risk in the medium of comics, film, and television with a focus on a range of risk scenarios. From their research, risk – both in comics, and in film – newly emerges as fundamentally serial, grounded in the inherently recursive structure of risk (managing one risk begets another). All of these studies show that risk in fiction not only participates in risk discourse, but also reflects critically on how ideas of global catastrophic risk are socially created and negotiates crises of identity that are the attendants of a world perceived as at risk. On the whole, the combined results of the project demonstrate that a transdisciplinary approach to literature, comics, and film analysis is indispensable in the study of risk in fiction. They draw attention to the unique and specific knowledge literary and cultural studies can provide about the fictional participation in technological and environmental discourses of global catastrophic risk. Risk, a concept that is defined as simultaneously “real” and speculative, when used as a category of literary and film analysis, makes visible a type of fiction in which the boundaries between realism and speculation are being dissolved. In the risk fiction discussed – novels, comics, and films, the motivating force of anticipation in the present becomes as concrete as various possible futures.
Publications
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“Klimawandelroman.“ Ecocriticism. Eine Einführung. Eds. Gabriele Dürbeck & Urte Stobbe. Köln: Böhlau, 2015. 233-44
Mayer, Sylvia
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“Travels With Carl: Apocalyptic Zombiescape, Masculinity and Seriality in Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead.” Ed. Peter Freese. The Journey of Life in American Life and Literature. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. 187-204
Cortiel, Jeanne
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"Knowledge on Edge: Resident Evil, Feminism and the Rescue of the Female Child." Knowledge Landscapes North America. Christian Kloeckner, Simone Knewitz, Sabine Sielke. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2016. 249-268
Cortiel, Jeanne
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“From an Ethics of Proximity to an Ethics of Connectivity: Risk, Mobility, and Deterritorialization in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 61.4 (2016): 489-505
Mayer, Sylvia
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“Science in the World Risk Society: Risk, the Novel, and Global Climate Change.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 64.2 (2016): 207-221
Mayer, Sylvia
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“World Risk Society and Ecoglobalism: Risk, Literature, and the Anthropocene.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Ed. Hubert Zapf. Berlin: DeGruyter, 2016. 494- 509
Mayer, Sylvia
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“Risikonarrativ. Literarische Umwelt-Risikonarrative.” Ökologische Genres: Naturästhetik – Umweltethik – Wissenspoetik. Ed. Evi Zemanek. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. 211-27
Mayer, Sylvia
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“Risk and Feminist Utopia: Radicalizing the Future.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 77.5 (2018): 1353-76
Cortiel, Jeanne
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“Oil Fiction as Risk Fiction: Inhabiting Risk in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit.” Green Letters 23.2 (2019): 168-178
Mayer, Sylvia
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“‘The End is Nigh’: Risikotechnologien und Alieninvasionen in Alan Moores Watchmen (1986/87) und Ben Templesmiths Singularity 7 (2004).” Comics und Naturwissenschaften. Ed. Clemens Heydenreich. Ch. A. Bachmann, 2019: pp. 157–70
Oehme, Laura
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“Risk Without End? The Seriality of Risk, the Outbreak Narrative and Serial Post- Apocalypse in Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain.” In:
Apocalypse TV : essays on society and self at the end of the world . Ed. by Sherry Ginn and Michael Cor
Müller, Sebastian
