<b>Melting Ice and the Paradoxes of Zeno: Didactic Impulses and Aesthetic Distanciation in German Climate Change Fiction</b> // Impulsos didácticos y distancia estética en la ficción alemana sobre el cambio climático

Authors

  • Axel Howarth Goodbody University of Bath

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2013.4.1.502

Keywords:

climate change, German literature, Ilija Trojanow, EisTau, cambio climático, literatura alemana

Abstract

Although global warming has been a topic of American and British popular fiction since the 1980s, its literary representation has only recently become an object of academic enquiry. Perhaps a score of German novels on the subject have also appeared, and critical analysis of these is now called for. Following a general outline of the socio-political, philosophical, and ethical issues which climate change raises, and of the particular aesthetic challenges which writing about global warming poses, Ilija Trojanow’s EisTau (Melting Ice, 2011) serves as a basis for discussion of the tensions between confessional and didactic impulses on the one hand, and recognition of the need for an aesthetic facilitating detachment on the other.

 

Resumen

 

            Aunque el calentamiento global ha aparecido en la literatura popular americana y británica desde los años 80, su representación literaria no se ha converitdo en objeto de investigación académica hasta recientemente. Quizá una veintena de novelas alemanas sobre el tema también han aparecido, requiriendo así un análisis critico. Siguiendo un resumen general de los asuntos socio-políticos, filosóficos y éticos que el cambio climático ha planteado, y de los desafíos estéticos particulares que surgen al escribir sobre el calentamiento global, la novela EisTau (Melting Ice, 2011) de Ilija Trojanow sirve como base para debatir las tensiones entre los impulsos confesionales y didácticos, por un lado, y sobre el reconocimiento de la necesidad de una estética que facilite el desapego, por otro.

 

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Author Biography

Axel Howarth Goodbody, University of Bath

University of Bath, United Kingdom

mlsahg@bath.ac.uk

Axel Goodbody (Ecozon@ Associate Editor) is Professor of German and European Culture at the University of Bath. He grew up in Ireland and studied German and French at Trinity College, Dublin. After teaching English language and culture as Lektor at the University of Kiel from 1973 to 1976, he stayed on in Germany to complete his doctorate on German nature poetry (Romantic and 20th-century). Since the early 1980s he has lectured at the University of Bath, UK. His main research interests are modern and contemporary German literature and film, ecocritical theory, and memory studies. He is editor of book series 'Nature, Literature and Culture' (Rodopi) and 'New Studies in European Cinema' (Lang). He was President of EASLCE from 2004 to 2006.

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Published

2013-05-01

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2013): Green Countercultures

Section

General Section 4.1 (Spring 2013)

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