Allegory and Articulation in Geographies of Climate Fiction

Keywords: Climate fiction, allegory, articulation
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 75

Abstract

This article first reviews how geographers have begun to analyze climate fiction. Some analyses reflect a certain ‘ideology critique,’ based on Fredric Jameson’s theories of allegory, while others foreground the agency of fiction in prefiguring political futures. In this article I suggest that, as others in geography have also recently argued, Gillian Hart’s theorization of articulation is useful in bridging the classic disciplinary divide between historical materialist and poststructuralist accounts. After discussing examples of ‘ideology critique’ and what I term the ‘fiction-as-change-agent’ critique, I examine how theorizing articulation can help show the dialectical relationship between ideology and fictive agency in
the context of contemporary climate fiction.