The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
View metadata, citation andbrought similarCORE to papersyou by at core.ac.uk provided by Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto Faculty of Arts University of Helsinki Reading Mutant Narratives The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction Kaisa Kortekallio Doctoral dissertation to be presented for public discussion with the permission of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Helsinki, in Auditorium 116, Unioninkatu 35, on the 21st of February, 2020 at 12 o’clock. Helsinki 2020 The author received funding for this research from the Helsinki University Research Fund (2014–2018). Part of the research was also conducted in the consortium project Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (2018–2022), funded by the Academy of Finland (no. 315052). Cover design and illustration: Kaisa Kortekallio ISBN 978-951-51-5775-1 (pbk.) ISBN 978-951-51-5776-8 (PDF) Unigrafia Helsinki 2020 Abstract Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than- human modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-than- human aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation. Tiivistelmä Reading Mutant Narratives keskittyy ekologista kriisiä käsitteleviin mutantti- kertomuksiin ja niille tyypilliseen kokemuksellisuuteen. Mutanttikertomukset ovat tie- teisfiktiivisiä kertomuksia, joissa ihmiskeskeiset ja posthumanistiset piirteet yhdistyvät ja antavat lukijalle mahdollisuuksia ekologiseen ymmärrykseen. Esimerkkeinä mu- tanttikertomuksista tutkimus nostaa esiin kolmen yhdysvaltalaisen tieteiskirjailijan, Greg Bearin, Paolo Bacigalupin ja Jeff VanderMeerin, teoksia. Nämä teokset asettavat ihmisen osaksi ekologisia, evolutiivisia ja teknologisia vuorovaikutussuhteita, joissa myös ihmisruumiit ja ruumiillinen kokemus muuttavat muotoaan. Väitöskirja tutkii siis, kuinka tieteisfiktiiviset kertomukset ympäristöllisestä ja kokemuksellisesta muutok- sesta voivat kehittää ruumiillista kokemusta. Kertomuksentutkimukseen ja empiiriseen lukijatutkimukseen tukeutuen tutki- mus lähtee oletuksesta, että sopivissa olosuhteissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen voi edes- auttaa kokemuksellisia muutoksia. Tutkimus tarkastelee tieteisfiktion lukemista eletyn ruumiillisen kokemuksen tasolla. Lukukokemuksen analyysissa otetaan huomioon sekä lukijan ruumiillinen, subjektiivinen ja historiallinen tilanne että luettujen teosten kytkeytyminen romaanikerronnan ja tieteisfiktion lajityypin perinteisiin. Suuri osa nykykirjallisuudesta esittää ruumiillisen kokemuksen luonnollisena ja kätkee oman kerronnallisen vaikutusvaltansa, mutta mutanttikertomusten kerronnalliset keinot saat- tavat outouttaa lukijoiden ruumiillista kokemusta suhteessa sekä elettyyn ympäristöön että kirjallisuuteen itseensä. Tieteisfiktion tutkimuksen käsitteistöä uudistaen väitös- kirja kutsuu tällaista lukemisen dynamiikkaa ruumiilliseksi vieraannuttamiseksi. Lukukokemuksen analyysien avulla tutkimus esittää, kuinka kirjallisuuden luke- minen ohjaa osaltaan lukijoiden tunne- ja havaintotottumusten muotoutumista. Se tuo yhteen ruumiillis-kognitiivisia ja posthumanistisia lähestymistapoja kirjallisuuden- tutkimukseen ja muotoilee performatiivis-enaktiivisen lähilukemisen metodin, joka auttaa sanallistamaan lukukokemuksen ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja ei-inhimilliseen kurovia puolia. Ruumiillisen kokemuksellisuuden syventäminen tämän metodin avulla tuo ekologisen tieteisfiktion tiiviimmin osaksi globaalin ympäristömuutoksen kokemuksellista tilannetta. Acknowledgements Reading Mutant Narratives has found its current form in the pressures of various flows of discussions, impressions, and hauntings. During the six years of working on the dissertation project, I have had the fortune of thinking and feeling with brilliant mentors, colleagues, and friends, as well as meshing with stimulating and supporting environments. All of them have left their traces on this work. First of all, I wish to thank my supervisors, Dr. Merja Polvinen and Professor Bo Pettersson, who have patiently guided me through countless confusions and distractions, and generously offered their expertise on all aspects of the work, ranging from strategic choices to matters of style and voice. Merja, in her capacity as my primary mentor, has always supported my search for strange new modes of thought, and this time of learning has been characterized by mutual trust and respect. It is a joy to see her shape niches for younger academics with her remarkable curiosity, care, and cunning, and I can only hope I can keep learning from her example. For the finished manuscript, I was also fortunate to receive highly perceptive and constructive expert comments from Professor Stacy Alaimo and Professor Pieter Vermeulen. I am particularly grateful to Professor Vermeulen for agreeing to act as my faculty opponent in the public defense of this dissertation. I also extend my warmest thanks to the faculty representatives in the committee, Dr. Klaus Brax and Dr. Kristina Malmio. During the last two years of the project, I have had the opportunity to knit my work into the wider story-critical and exploratory aims of the Instrumental Narratives research consortium. In the Helsinki team, lead by Merja Polvinen, I have enjoyed the brilliance of Parker Krieg, Hanna-Riikka Roine, Esko Suoranta, and Jouni Teittinen, as well as the constructive provocations of the Turku and Tampere teams (lead, respectively, by Hanna Meretoja and Maria Mäkelä). The consortium has also enabled my six-month visit to the University of Ghent and the Narrating the Mesh project, where I have had the chance to explore the limits of human meaning-making with some of the superminds of contemporary narrative studies: Professor Marco Caracciolo, Shannon Lambert, Gry Ulstein, and Susannah Crockford. Marco’s theoretical work is one of the most potent substances at work in this dissertation, and I continue to be amazed by both his thinking and by the collaborative networks he facilitates. I am grateful to all the Narminians for sympathizing with the excitement and terror I have felt during the final stages of this project. For the working conditions afforded by the financial support, I am grateful to the University of Helsinki Research Fund and the Academy of Finland. For continuity and work space, I thank the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. The Department has also given me the opportunity to practice collective thinking by teaching a number of courses on science fiction, ecological thought, and posthumanism. I thank all my students for their insights, their curiosity, and their patience with my many hesitancies and experiments. I also extend my gratitude to the particular plant life that has participated both in my research and my classes: the great oak of the Metsätalo yard, and the countless species and specimens at the Kaisaniemi Botanical Garden. For comments, peer support, and friendship, I thank my colleagues in the Doctoral Programme for Philosophy, Arts, and Society at the University of Helsinki, and particularly Anna Ovaska, Laura Oulanne, Vesa Kyllönen, Saara Moisio, Pii Telakivi, and Harri Mäcklin, with whom I have had the pleasure of tackling the hardest enactivist and phenomenological dilemmas. Another major supportive network, without which I would not have even started my PhD work, is the Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research (Finfar): Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Jyrki Korpua, Essi Varis, Essi Vatilo, Jari Käkelä, Mika Loponen, Päivi Väätänen, Irma Hirsjärvi,