This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

Čeněk Pýcha History in public space: Changes of institutions of memory Abstract The submitted dissertation project is based on a longer research interest in memory and remembering. Interdisciplinary memory studies is one of the most dynamically developing subdisciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The aim of this work is to contribute to the ongoing academic discussion and to explore some environments of making sense of the past, which so far stood rather on the periphery of research interests. The research field of this project is defined by the questioning of transformations of memory institutions. I observe this change primarily on the trajectory of movement from grand institutions of memory to small ones. As the grand institutions of memory, I understand the traditional institutions of the interpretation of the past that were born in the modernization process. In this dissertation project, I focus mainly on institutions of heritage preservation and museums. With the partial disintegration of grand collective frameworks, these institutions are divided into small institutions. I study this movement in case studies on contemporary cultural practices of remembrance in new memory ecologies. I focus on digital platforms for travelers, remembering through visual communication or interest in places...

This qualitative research focuses on the decision to stay childfree as a specific individual strategy for coping with the effects of climate crisis. The purpose of this study is to show ways in which the climate crisis is internalized and stressed within the decision to stay childfree. Data for this research were created through semi-structured interviews with 12 informants coming from all around the world. These informants were divided into two different categories. First of them, the kinnovators, perceive their decision to stay childfree as a way to erase the boundary between human and non-human worlds and therefore, similarly to Donna J. Haraway (2016), they perceive their childfreeness as an alternative to the popularly held belief of genalogical view on human kinship. These informants experience a great amount of environmental grief (Kevorkian, 2004) based on the values of antispeciesism and they see the main causes of climate crisis in the epoch of Anthropocene and therefore in the problems connected to human society - such as overpopulation (e.g. Ehrlich, 1986, compared to Haraway, 2016) or consumerism (Bell, 2004). Kinnovators perceive their decision to stay childfree as their individual responsibility and as a way to mitigate climate crisis, as well as a means to maintain their integrity....

This essay analyzes the depictions of urban nature in Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018). The theoretical framework consists primarily of Astrid Bracke’s thoughts on “urban ecology”, Christophe Den Tant’s descriptions of “the urban sublime” and William Cronon’s thoughts on the concept of “Wilderness”, all of which work in the ecocritical field. My Year of Rest and Relaxation explores the concepts of naturalness and artificiality through language and various themes. It takes place in an urban environment where the main character chooses to isolate herself in her city apartment, hence the existence of nature in the traditional sense is absent, yet the text works consistently with elements of urban nature in varying situations. The way in which this urban nature is presented relates to other themes such as the exploration of borders and dichotomies such as nature and culture, organic and artificial as well as animate and inanimate.

As a medium of modernity, film has always been entwined with the energy regime sustaining it. This thesis is interested in the interrelation between film and oil, and approached as a piece of petro-fiction, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear (1953) is subject to a close, ecocritical analysis. A selection of four additional oil-films are used as points of comparison. By looking at a variety of representational and aesthetic aspects, the study explores how the film visualises the Anthropocene and negotiates the oil culture in which it exists. By reading the film in terms of oil, this thesis finds that the film in various ways expresses an entanglement with oil culture, while also criticising the same dependency. From the five oil films that have been analysed, catastrophe is an inherent motif, and part of the attraction of oil as subject matter, mirrored in broader culture of exuberance. In contrast to the other films, The Wages of Fear plays less into spectacle but opens to a critical examination of the various exploitations involved at the hands of the oil industry.

Recent work in the geohumanities has renewed a call for the inclusion of creative work within the discipline of geography. This dissertation works both creatively and critically to answer that call, and to contribute to the geohumanities generally and the subfield of geopoetics particularly. In the theoretical portion of this work, I draw from and dialogue with creative geographies, emotional geographies, nonrepresentational theory, and post-human geographies, arguing that geopoetics is both theory and practice-based and focuses on how to apprehend the world, how to acknowledge and practice the act of perceiving, and the relationship that grows through the act of perceiving and being perceived. This attendance is an ethical act; it helps to enrich understandings of place and of human relationships to the world. I use this understanding of geopoetics to rethink relationships to place through the embrace of poetic technique, an ethics of care, and an acceptance of situated, autobiographical emotion in practice. I use the work of three philosopher-poets (McKay, Zwicky, Lilburn) to argue that geopoetics is a relational ontology that helps contribute culturally to embodied understandings of ethics, landscape, and environment through its practice of attendance and perception. Separately, all three writers contribute variously to conceptualizations of wilderness, home and place; together, I propose that their work serves to further define geopoetics through the manner by which one attends to the world. I also specifically use Zwicky’s work on lyric to intervene in non-representational theory, clarifying ideas on a body-in-the-world. Attendance, for me, involves emotional, sensory, and philosophical engagement but is focused on the world, not on the perceiver. The creative portion of this dissertation puts the theoretical work into practice, adding to understandings of what geopoetics might do. This creative work is an act of attendance, which has as its root a geography of love and an emphasis on how to perceive. Its inclusion further validates creative practice and the inclusion of creative professionals within the discipline of geography. / Graduate / 2022-08-25

Our impact on the planet's functioning has allegedly become so profound that during the last years the scientific community has been considering assuming a shift from the Holocene - our current geological epoch - to the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. According to philosopher Bernard Stiegler, this "era of Humans" is not only visible in the devastation of natural ecosystems, but also through the destruction of human skills and methods of transmitting knowledge. The Anthropocene, which was initiated by the industrial revolution, thus passed through the industrialization of culture, and has disrupted our understanding of the world. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti proposes that with the advent of this new era, we ought to be aware of not only the ever-present environmental catastrophes, but that we also ought to use it as a tool for reappraising what it means to be Human. According to her, the Western subject was created as a product of the Humanist cultural hegemony which defined it within a logic of binary opposition. In light of these ideas, this Master's thesis attempts to show that art can provide us methods for redefining our relationship to each other, as well as to the wider world, and help us navigate the contours of the ongoing crisis. The work uses Posthumanist thought and its affiliated...

I have in this thesis problematized the Swedish climate transition potentially making Sweden one of the first fossil free welfare states in the world. The forest industry has been designated as one of the central components of climate transition in that it will help replace fossil fuels and other unsustainable materials. One group being affected by the increased forestry is that of the Sámi reindeer herders. Not only are they already affected by the effects of climate change to a great extent, but the forest industry in turn causes problems for reindeer husbandry and is a direct source of reduced quality in forests which provide lichen, the primary food source for reindeer. I have conducted interviews with five reindeer herders in the Malå forest Sámi village, in Västerbotten, in northern Sweden, to gain a keener understanding of the effects of climate change and the forest industry on reindeer herding, from a security perspective. The results show that the interviewees perceive climate change and large-scale forestry as a threat to their livelihood connected to reindeer husbandry and, in turn, a significant part of Sámi culture and existence, and that the two exacerbate the effects of each other. Among the effects, are the loss of forest that provides shelter and sustenance for reindeer, as well as the wellbeing and spirituality of the reindeer herders. Using theories drawn from Anthropocene and postcolonial literature, I hereby problematize the climate transition in Sweden in that it is based on a particular way of viewing the relationship between humans and nature. This causes problems for reindeer husbandry, and ultimately a reduction in security for reindeer herders that is reminiscent of and upholding the frictional and colonial bonds between Sweden and Sápmi (the region inhabited by Sámi people).

Using slow camera movement in 20 minutes in five video scenes of completely CGI-rendered environment called Area of Universal Latency, I am mapping space-time of the zone which is located in the north-western Slovakia. Minimalistic narration of the autonomous single-channel video projection is confronting subjectivism with universality of the Anthropocene, vanitas and spirituality with the belief of consumerism in infinite accumulation and simulacra of virtuality with the absolute truth. The story of this video-poem is communicated through virtual environment, composed sounds and natural noises. This thesis is presenting a fragment of my attempt to record the morphology of the specific place through which, as the title of the video states, I am indicating the state of reality and its consequences yet not describing it explicitly.

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