Roadmaps for saving the world? Construction and use of master and counter-narratives in programmatic climate fiction

Abstract

This article discusses the capacity of climate fiction to construct master and counter-narratives as part of the logic of its storyworlds, and to use such narrative structures to both (1) represent climate change as a grand-scale problem requiring collective action and (2) function as environmentally oriented counter-narratives to currently dominant discourses. Drawing from both sociolinguistic and philosophical approaches to master or “grand” narratives, this two-pronged analytical approach is prompted by two thorny questions in environmental humanities and ecocritical literary studies. Firstly, can climate change, as a grand-scale complex system, be usefully represented in narrative form? Secondly, how can climate fiction contribute to public discourse around climate change, and to what effect? While these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered within the scope of one article, the inquiry they inform here yields new insight into how master and counter-narratives can be usefully employed, as narratological concepts, for investigating the expressive and persuasive potential of climate fiction. Regarded as literary devices, they can be fruitfully analyzed as tools for world-building that facilitate representing disruptive environmental and societal change as a matter of narrative contestation of the storyworld. Understood in terms of rhetoric, on the other hand, reading climate fiction as counter-narration provides a new framework for assessing the potential of such grand-scale storytelling as meaningful political action.