Sylvia Mayer is chair of American Studies and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her major research areas are Ecocriticism, environmentally oriented literary and cultural studies, and African American Studies. Her research covers North American literature from the 18th century to the present. Over the last years, her ecocritical work has focused on the cultural and literary imagination of (global) environmental risk, most importantly, on the study of climate change fiction and petrofiction as environmental risk narratives. Her investigation of risk narratives has more recently been complemented by an additional focus on the concept of resilience. Her publications include monographs on Toni Morrison’s early novels and on the environmental ethical dimension of New England Regionalist Writing, 1865 –1918. She has edited and co-edited several volumes, among them Restoring the Connection to the Natural World: Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination (2003), Beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin : Essays on the Writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe (2011, with Monika Müller), American Environments: Climate - Cultures – Catastrophe (2012, with Christof Mauch), and The Anticipation of Catastrophe. Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture (2014, with Alexa Weik von Mossner).
Angry Optimism,Utopian Minimalism, and Resilience: Writing America in Times of Climate Crisis
Writing America in times of climate crisis means responding to the consequences of current human-made climate change that have begun to massively impact societies and cultures worldwide and that have, more specifically, considerably added to the sense of instability and uncertainty characterizing contemporary U.S. society and culture. Climate narratives, whether factual or fictional, always address a world in transition, a world in the process of being remade by climate change, and by doing so reveal the necessity to probe and rethink our understanding of the everyday and the practices that rely on it. While a lot of U.S. climate fiction has focused on climate catastrophe, on apocalyptic scenarios that engage the causes and possible consequences of socioecological devastation, this talk departs from a focus on catastrophe and decline. Instead, it discusses climate change novels that acknowledge the momentous, often dire, transformations climate change is inevitably bringing about, but, at the same time, also develop socioecological visions of resilience that are firmly anchored in relational thinking and introduce forms of adaptability, flexibility and persistence. Focusing on novels whose fictional worldbuilding centers on the U.S., and drawing in particular on the concepts of “angry optimism” (Kim Stanley Robinson) and “utopian minimalism” (Anahid Nersessian), the talk discusses how these novels explore the shifts in epistemological, ontological and ethical conceptualization that are necessary to cultivate resilience in a world marked by the risks and vulnerabilities of ongoing climate change.
