Pagination
43-53ISBN-13
9780522873696Language
engResearch statement
Background
Amitav Ghosh has argued that anthropogenic climate change presents a crucial and unmet challenge to fiction writers, one which will surely come to be seen as a failure of imagination in the face of our present reality. While writing in science fiction, dystopian, and disaster genres has imagined environmental crisis, realist fiction which explicitly addresses the psychological and emotional impacts of climate crisis is an emerging form. In this short story, the researcher considers the impacts of the 2009 bushfires on the life of its protagonist. It builds on Trexler's insistence that climate change 'remakes narrative operations' and asks what sort of characters, and figurations of time emerge from this. Responding to climate crisis in literature necessitates writing at the intersection of science, literature, and the everyday experience of human and nonhuman entities. It involves reading existing stories and narrative forms with an eye for these intersections. It means asking how is climate crisis producing our experience of this century, and it's relationship to history?
Contribution:
In the short story ‘In season’ the researcher explores the psychological impacts of living with and through climate crisis via a first person narrative. The protagonist is a young woman who moves from Sydney to Melbourne at the end of the 2000s to work in a fruit market. This focalization allows the researcher to consider the environmental impacts of bushfire, flood, and the disconnect between rural and urban regions in Australia. Separated into four parts, each representing a season, the researcher considers the idea of generations, epochs, and calendars in times of crisis, building on work she began in her PhD thesis, and then in her books Adult Fantasy and The Island Will Sink.
Significance: The Meanjin Fine Fiction anthology presented the best short fiction published by one of Australia's oldest literary journals since 1980. The researcher appeared on ABC radio anPublication classification
JO3 Original Creative Works – Textual WorkScale
NTRO MinorPublisher
Melbourne University PressPlace of publication
Melbourne, Vic.Source
Meanjin : fine fiction 1980 to now
