Sunday, January 3, 2016

''Where are the works of art,'' they asked,'' the fictional works about climate change?''

From an online overview of cli fi movies in the last ten years, by GWU film critic Michael Svoboda:

EXCERPTS:

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In a July 10, 2015 blog post, Dan Bloom ...recalled the challenges separately issued in 2005 by Bill McKibben and Robert Macfarlane.

''Where are the works of art,'' they asked,'' the fictional works about climate change?''

In the 10 years since these questions were posed, Bloom argued, they have been answered—by cli-fi novels and cli-fi films.

In fact, by 2005 at least 14 novels about climate change had already been published in the UK and the United States, and what is still the most commercially successful feature film about climate change, ''The Day After Tomorrow,'' had been released the year before (a point McKibben grudgingly acknowledged).

But Bloom is right: in the 10 years since McKibben and Macfarlane issued their challenges, there has been an outpouring of work.

So much so that the state of ‘cli-fi’ is now regularly updated in the pages of major news venues such as The Guardian and The New York Times ; in magazines devoted to political/cultural commentary such as Dissent and Salon ; in environmental newswires and websites such as ClimateWire, The Daily Climate, and Grist; and in film-trade publications such as Entertainment Weekly. Fictional works about climate change have also been addressed in the pages of WIREs Climate Change. In 2011, Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra provided an overview of ‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism.’ Then, in 2012, Stephen Bottoms covered ‘Climate Science on the London Stage.’

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