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Accepted Paper:
From devastation to transformation: the rise of the climate bildungsroman
Nandita Mahajan
(Indian Institute of Technology Bombay)
Through an analysis of various works of climate fiction, I argue that the Bildungsroman—the coming-of-age novel—as a literary form is uniquely positioned to narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a climate-changed world.
Paper long abstract:
Climate-change discourse is suffused with a profound sense of loss, amid accelerating ecological degradation. While some environmental literary critics consider the elegy an apt means of narrativizing these losses, others call for genres capable of moving beyond mourning and toward adaptive transformation. I argue that the coming-of-age novel, the Bildungsroman—which typically depicts a protagonist who undergoes a transformational journey following crisis, and eventually comes to terms with the world—may narrativize the process of moving beyond climate grief and adapting to a climate-changed world. I indicate a corpus of novels that may be termed "climate Bildungsromane," which envision a range of transformations following climate grief. Through an analysis of a few significant examples, I explore climate Bildungsromane’s tendency to narrate the journey from ecocatastrophe to adaptation through a fusion of modern scientific rationality with forms of belief and storytelling commonly considered premodern. I consider how and why this enigmatic paradox surfaces across cultural imaginings of journeys beyond climate grief.