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Cross-fertilizing narrative theory and work in the environmental humanities, this article argues that the loop as a narrative form holds special significance vis-à-vis the imagining of climate change in contemporary fiction. More specifically, the loop captures the uncertainty and moral stakes of climate change as a planetary event that affirms human societies' entanglement with the nonhuman but also disrupts their projection into a stable future. The starting point is Jesse Kellerman's time loop narrative Controller, which presents the reader with three alternative scenarios focusing on a man and his elderly mother. The discussion then turns to two novels (Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods and Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts) in which looping structures are more localized but nevertheless color the reader's interpretation of a dystopian situation. In both works, looping structures are deployed in conjunction with metafictional devices that hint at a way out of the loop. However, the loop remains unbroken in diegetic terms. Finally, the article turns to Hanya Yanagihara's novel To Paradise, arguing that its preoccupation with ethical entanglement with regard to climate disaster takes a loop-like form through the unexplained return of textual elements (e.g., the characters' names) across the book's three parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anthropocene, the notion of a new geological era marked by the impact of Western societies on the earth, challenges certain limitations of the human imagination, such as the ability to think beyond the human scale or the ability to appreciate non-human intelligence. Both children's literature and the study of children's literature need to address these challenges. This article suggests that it is the formal and stylistic strategies of children's literature that are best suited to bridge the gap between Anthropocene and the ecological imagination. In order to consider the transformational potential of these strategies, this article proposes the rhetorical figure of the childadult, whose temporal multiplicity captures both the child-as-child reader and the future child-as-adult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay expands concerns of rhetorical narrative theory and econarratology by attending to rhetorical agencies of nonhuman beings within emergent conditions of landscape. Through analysis of two site-specific art pieces--Alan Sonfist's Time Landscape and Agnes Denes's Wheatfield: A Confrontation--it considers ways that interactions between humans, animals, plants, and other living beings produce situated networks of rhetorical engagement. In both sites, artists tell specific stories through affordances of landscape. These human narratives take advantage of and exist alongside various nonhuman rhetorical agencies, which are also shaped by affordances of landscape, though directed to different audiences for different purposes. From this ecological perspective, humans and nonhumans exist within rhetorical, multispecies communities that are shaped by and shape the affordances of topographic form. Rhetoricity and topographic form emerge simultaneously and cooperatively through interactive conditions of interspecies being. This understanding of landscape rhetoricity remains sensitive to radical openness in the rhetorical occasion, noting ways that ecological conditions shape and are shaped by rhetorical interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the emergence of indigenous literature contextualizes the historicity of colonialism and the ensuing resistance. This present study articulates how the Native Hawai’ians articulate their resistance against American domination through the resilience of their cultural heritage and advocates for political changes, as is reflected in Lynn Kalama Nakkim’s Mahele o Maui. The study applied an econarratological perspective which foregrounds the reader's active role in reimagining a different socio-cultural perspective of the natural environment from Mahele’s perspective and engaging with other (non-Western) environmental imagination. The theory of resilience and resistance, as stated by Adamson and Molina, underlines how indigenous Hawai’ian tradition manages to persevere and transform through the Western model of narration, a novel. The study explores how Nakkim’s fiction articulates the indigenous epistemology of Aloha Aina to actively resist American domination with the eventual goal of achieving sovereignty and independence. The finding concludes how Native Hawai’ians’ literature has a similar concern with other indigenous struggles in the world, advocative and politically oriented in outlook, echoing their struggle for the right of self-determination and eventual sovereignty.

This paper contextualizes the intricate relationship between language, culture, and place in Milton Murayama's All I am Asking for is My Body, underlining the dynamic of the Japanese-American diasporic experience in Hawaii. The econarratological analysis delves into the spatial representation and homodiegetic narration employed by Murayama to immerse readers in the plantation labor experience and the linguistic landscapes of Hawaii. The study examines the complex dynamics between Standard English and Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) in Murayama's work, highlighting their role in shaping the cultural and linguistic identity of the characters. By employing immersive textual cues, such as vivid descriptive imagery and the strategic use of language styles, Murayama creates a mental model of narratives that accurately depicts the historicity of the Nikkei community, focusing on the plantation labor experience. This paper argues that the deliberate blending of Standard English and HCE in Murayama's fiction enhances readers' engagement and understanding of the Nikkei experience and contributes to broader discussions on language, culture, and identity within the context of diaspora literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first sight, Mills & Boon romances may seem to bear little or no relation to environmentalism; however, critical comments about the negative impact of sun, sea and sand tourism are not uncommon in the pages of these novels. The tourism boom of the 1960s and 1970s led to increasing concern about its effects on the environment. Using a historical approach, I focus on several romance novels set in southern Europe, the area attracting the highest rate of visitors at that time and visibly suffering the consequences of unbridled construction. Some of the tools of econarratology and cognitive ecocriticism serve to provide further insights into the novels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pastoral serves as a keyword when understanding Seamus Heaney’s literary production, both in terms of stylistic features and imagery. Although critical attention has focused on the connection between his pastoral works and contemporary Irish politics, the growth of ecocritical scholarship in the last few decades has made evident the importance of broadening such an analytical scope to relationships between humans and the environment while studying this genre. In this alignment, the present essay offers an ecocritical reading of some selected pastoral poems by Heaney, with a specific focus on his revival of the eclogue through the collection “Electric Light” (2001). Precisely, the poems “Virgil: Eclogue IX,” “Bann Valley Eclogue,” and “Glanmore Eclogue” will be read through the innovative perspective offered by the recent engagement of affect theory with ecocriticism: by doing so, I argue that Heaney’s poems can be understood as valuable nature narratives that stress the connectedness between the human and the nonhuman, while resonating with the urgencies posed by the current environmental crisis to re-think more ethical forms of relationships between them. Furthermore, through the lens of econarratology, attention will be paid to the ecological potentials expressed by the formal features of the eclogue: this observation considers, on the one hand, the notion of ‘relationality’ within the practice of the shepherds’ dialogue/singing and, on the other hand, how this literary form stresses the attachment between the human and the environment, both in the real world and in the storyworld. Hence, when exceeding a strictly politically oriented critical analysis of his work, Heaney’s eclogues become visible as compelling ecocritical accounts that favor investigating the role of (pastoral) literature in fostering critical discussions about human/nonhuman ethics as a way to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

This paper explores "shadowtime", or the co-existence of multiple temporalities, in Michelle Paver's novel Dark Matter: A Ghost Story (2010). Dark Matter is filled with temporally strange figures that evade human vision and understanding. Central among these is the spectral presence of a gengånger, or ghost, which haunts the Arctic research station where the novel is largely set. After tracking some of the metaphorical and material dimensions of the spectral, this essay investigates "shadowtime" in the context of the novel's various 'archives'. It then looks at how the incorporeal or immaterial concepts of value and choice frame the novel's 'dark matters'. 'Possibility', or the question of 'what if?' pervades the novel's pages, encouraging readers to imagine multiple realities simultaneously. This essay argues that, although set in a period predating wide awareness of climate change, Dark Matter's "shadowtimes" create forms of temporal and ontological instability that resonate with the existential uncertainties of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he led the ERC Starting Grant project "Narrating the Mesh." (2017–2022). His work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of several books including the most recently Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities (2022) and Contemporary Fiction and Climate Uncertainty: Narrating Unstable Futures (2022). In September 2021, Dr. Wang Hongri interviewed Caracciolo on Anthropocene literature and econarratology via e-mail. In this interview, Caracciolo sheds light on the use of such concepts as the Anthropocene, climate crisis and climate change fiction in literary studies. Further, he elaborates on the tardiness of narratological interests in environmental issues and narrative's formal affordance to address the Anthropocene condition. After commenting on the relationship between New Formalism and the contextualist vein of contemporary narrative theory, Caracciolo identifies four future directions for the study of Anthropocene literature and econarratology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should critics approach narrative temporality in times of ecological disorder? Literary critics have attempted to bridge eco-criticism with narrative theory, shifting attention from narrative content to narrative form. Econarratology studies how narrative shapes our understanding of the environment. Yet, eco-critical interrogations of narrative form are lacking. Grounded in a homogeneous conception of time, narratology often relays a dichotomy between narrativity and “dysnarrativity”. This dichotomy fails to translate the variety of temporal processes in film. I shall highlight the problem underlying Jacques Rancière's critique of Deleuze's film-philosophy and its relevance for narrative theory. My discussion of this dispute is grounded in the examination of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Critics invariably base their analyses on Boonmee's remembrances and reduce narrative complexity to dysnarrative indeterminacy by accommodating non-human storylines into a human plot. I argue that Uncle Boonmee both confirms and bypasses the critique of linear narrative that is at heart of the Rancière-Deleuze discussion. In doing so, Weerasethakul's feature calls for a new paradigm – different, yet unlike the crystalline narrative, positively determined. By bringing the event to the fore, Deleuze offers another theoretical backdrop for event narratology, that in turn proves useful to econarratology.

This study reads Gary Pak's A Ricepaper Airplane (1998) as a reflection of the Korean-American diasporic imagination in Hawai'i and their turbulent experience. Through Sun Wha's recollection of his eventful past as revolutionary, activist and labourer, both in Korea and Hawai'i, Pak dramatises the rootlessness which results from inability to be attached to a particular locality. The theme of exile features prominently in Pak's spatial imagination of both Hawai'i and Korea, illustrated through Wha's continuous fight for survival from the Japanese occupiers, Hawai'ian labour plantation owners, and his ultimately futile endeavour of returning home to Korea. This paper further problematises readers' active role in constructing a mental model of simulation though the textual cues of spatialisation and narrative voice in navigating Wha's narration. Narrative voices, especially the slippage between the Standard English of the omniscient narrator and the Hawaii Creole English (HCE) of Sun Wha's recollection problematises the issue of "who sees" and "who speaks" which highlights the polyvocality of Wha's narration. To conclude, the study posits that the spatialisation and blending of narrative voices in A Ricepaper Airplane catalyses the immersion of readers into a site-specific, creolised-world mediated by polyvocal narration which come together to represent diasporic imagination of Hawai'i and Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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How should critics approach narrative temporality in times of ecological disorder? Literary critics have attempted to bridge eco-criticism with narrative theory, shifting attention from narrative content to narrative form. Econarratology studies how narrative shapes our understanding of the environment. Yet, eco-critical interrogations of narrative form are lacking. Grounded in a homogeneous conception of time, narratology often relays a dichotomy between narrativity and "dysnarrativity". This dichotomy fails to translate the variety of temporal processes in film. I shall highlight the problem underlying Jacques Rancière's critique of Deleuze's film-philosophy and its relevance for narrative theory. My discussion of this dispute is grounded in the examination of ApichatpongWeerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Critics invariably base their analyses on Boonmee's remembrances and reduce narrative complexity to dysnarrative indeterminacy by accommodating non-human storylines into a human plot. I argue that Uncle Boonmee both confirms and bypasses the critique of linear narrative that is at heart of the Rancière-Deleuze discussion. In doing so, Weerasethakul's feature calls for a new paradigm - different, yet unlike the crystalline narrative, positively determined. By bringing the event to the fore, Deleuze offers another theoretical backdrop for event narratology, that in turn proves useful to econarratology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Duncan Speakman's ambient literature, It Must Have Been Dark by Then (2017), is a paperback book that is read in tandem with a smartphone app to create an immersive experience for readers. Readers walk local landscapes and create an individual map via the Global Positioning System, while listening to narratives of climate change from Latvia, Louisiana, and Tunisia. This essay completes a rhetorical critique and econarratologically close reading of Speakman's book, and refers to rhetorical theories on walking by de Certeau, Mountford, Topinka, and Kalin and Frith. The essay concludes that Speakman's readers immerse themselves in print, digital narrative, and actual environments, becoming performers and cocreators of individual narratives. The readers' embodied immersion in the story allows it to transport them into distant environments affected by climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay situates Henry James’s Italian Hours within recent conversations about Anthropocene ecotourism. Although ecotourism aspires to educate its participants, scholars have struggled to define and assess the education it occasions. This article opens by offering Henry James’s reflections on reading John Ruskin in Italy to make an environmental humanities contribution to that scholarship. Thereafter, the article considers the Anthropocene ecotourism context in the other direction, drawing from “Siena Early and Late” to develop emergent work in econarratology.