Research

From Noah’s Ark to Climate Change: The Flood Motif in Contemporary Fiction (Working Title)

Stories about floods have been told around the world for thousands of years. Disastrous floods also form a crucial part of human and earth history. In light of the rising sea levels and dramatic increase of weather extremes, the relationship between material floods of the environment and imagined floods in storytelling appears to be closer than ever today. Contemporary literature integrates flooding in many different ways but flood narratives do more than represent momentous weather events. They address major issues in the conceptualization of human/nonhuman interaction. By focusing on the flood motif, my project aims at taking broader questions regarding human storytelling, the nonhuman environment, and the intricate ways in which they are intertwined into view. Flood narratives, I argue, indicate the wide reach of climate change by tampering with the very distinction between humans and more-than-human actors, highlighting the connectivity and entanglement of different actors and structures, and underlining nonhuman agency. Inconsequence, I am interested in the ways in which contemporary fiction not only represents flooding but allows floods to actively participate in storytelling.

My project engages with three larger topics: scale, agencies, and storytelling. I will explore these topics along with selected contemporary flood narratives. My primary sources feature flooding prominently, albeit in gradations of direct or subtle, material or figurative engagements. Many, but not all of these texts deal with climate change in more or less explicit ways. Most of my primary sources are situated in North America, some are set in Asia or South Asia, while many texts are also markedly transnational. For my theoretical framework, I draw from the vivid discussions emerging under the umbrella of the environmental humanities. I will specifically refer to terms and concepts developed in discussions around the contested epoch of the Anthropocene and its theoretical counter-discourse of posthumanism. Moreover, I will work with critical Indigenous theory. Indigenous epistemologies have long incorporated notions of relationality, which are crucial for understanding the environmental crisis at large and for investigating mythical and fictional representations of the environment. My primary texts are replete with aquatic (flood) language that describes not only material floods but also works figuratively to characterize phenomena such as bodily sensations, migrating human and more-than-human actors, or the flow of capital. To analyze the ambiguous functions of narrated floods, I will draw on the recent surge of posthumanist and new materialist scholarship that is particularly interested in the materiality of water and its relationship with processes of feeling, thinking, and knowing.