UCLA

Our Planet: Collective Narrative in the Climate Change Era investigates the relationship between collective narrative form and collective environmental politics in recent American culture. Climate change is increasingly understood as a ‘collective action problem’: one whose solutions require coordinated action at political, social, and planetary scale. Environmental writers have recently expanded their focus beyond to the depictions of threatened landscapes and species that have often dominated American econarrative to encompass the policy debates, mass movements, and infrastructural innovations that now make up a substantial proportion of popular coverage of climate change. But these writers often work within traditions that focus on the environmental impacts of individualized ethical and/or consumption behaviors. How, then, do writers adapt narrative forms to encompass action at collective scales of city, state, movement, and ultimately species? And how do new patterns of collective narrative encourage readers to imagine themselves as participants in shared forms of ecopolitical agency? The project combines narrative theory with a historicist approach to describe the formal means by which stories model people’s felt relationships to the collective patterns of behavior that shape their ecologies.I propose a framework for cataloguing and theorizing representations of collective action. I describe how narratives model what I call—borrowing from the philosophy of action—“phenomenologies of agency”: people’s culturally mediated experiences of themselves as participants in various causal networks. I use this framework to trace emerging tropes by which environmental stories invite readers to imagine themselves as participants in distinct forms of collective ecological agency and ask how these provide more or less effective models for climate politics. Specifically, I describe how ideas of ‘the human species’—constantly invoked in environmental discourse to name an imagined shared agency over the planet’s future, but treated in environmental theory as an abstraction beyond the reach of narrative—are made vivid and experiential through the deployment of new and repurposed narrative techniques. I find that two conceptions of species agency are especially influential across contemporary climate narratives: a reductive biological species agency that writers frequently use to excuse inaction, and a speculative political vision of humans as ‘worldmaking’ agents who reflexively design their own habitats through acts of mass deliberation. The dissertation’s two parts examine how these phenomenologies of species agency circulate across fictional and nonfictional climate discourses, including in novels by T.C. Boyle, N.K. Jemisin, and Kim Stanley Robinson. Ultimately, my narrative theoretical approach offers a new way to understand how patterns circulating in popular climate discourses nurture or restrain their publics’ capacity to take action.