This article analyses the role of plants in three well publicised Nordic climate fictions for young adults: Memories of Water by Emmi Itäranta, originally published in 2012, The World According to Anna (2013) by Jostein Gaarder, and Bouvetøya 2052 (2015) by Lars Mæhle. Departing from the wider scholarly field of ecocritical theory, the study draws on the developing field of cultural plant studies to examine the role allocated to plants in these fictional depictions of climate change. The analysis is based on a quantitative counting and sorting of all references to plants in the analysed fictions. The aim of this exercise is to contribute to theoretical reflections on climate fiction (cli-fi) as a literary form and to say something about the kind of literary thinking with, and about, plants that currently informs (Nordic) climate fiction for young adults, given that plants are highly important to the global climate. While broadening the discussion of climate change fiction to include a consideration of plants, the article further contributes to theoretical reflection on cli-fi through its Nordic perspective. In dialogue with Adam Trexler’s work on Anglo-American climate change fiction, the Nordic fictions examined here display both similar and diverging patterns of engagement with climate change, something that highlights the importance of reflecting on the genre with reference to a wide spectrum of local literatures.
Muriel Rukeyser’s 1936 documentary poem The Book of the Dead appropriates various forms of textual evidence to document a devastating mining disaster that occurred in 1930 in rural Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Written in the aftermath of the post-2008 financial crisis, Mark Nowak’s 2009 text Coal Mountain Elementary revisits the same landscape Rukeyser had sought out seventy years earlier, and makes use of a similar technique as it combines reports of a 2006 mine explosion in Sago, West Virginia, with news reports from Chinese mining accidents and other materials. Both poems dramatise the distance separating extractivism-vulnerable landscapes of the periphery (rural, or in Nowak’s case, global) from the accumulation of profits in the core. In reading these two texts side-by-side, it becomes clear that beyond their thematic similarities, the two poems also engage and adapt a methodology I call ‘resource poetics’, in which extractivist practices are exposed to view through poems’ material incorporation of textual artefacts testifying to their ruinous effects. As such, the two poems, situated roughly seventy-five years apart, offer trenchant critiques of modernity in its extractivist mode.
危险品化学品经营许可证（带存储）