Through the Weather Glass : A synergistic enquiry into the poetics of climate change articulating a post-climate change poetics in creative-critical form.

Burnett, Lucy (2013) Through the Weather Glass : A synergistic enquiry into the poetics of climate change articulating a post-climate change poetics in creative-critical form. PhD thesis, University of Salford.

Abstract

This Creative Writing thesis argues for the need to rethink our understanding of climate change and focuses on the response of creative writers to this phenomenon, whilst offering its own creative contribution. The critical component aims at articulating a post-climate change poetics. It reviews the mainstream literature in popular science writing, fiction and poetry from the point of view of a political frame-analysis of climate change, to demonstrate how a certain understanding of climate change maps onto conventions of literary genre. The thesis takes the view that many mainstream literary attempts to negotiate climate change are compromised by the teleological way in which they conceive of the phenomenon. As an alternative position, it draws on the work of climatologist Mike Hulme and physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad to encourage participation in climate change as a condition for negotiating its meaning. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass is proposed as a model for literary production informed by this poetics and as a model for the author's own creative practice. The creative component of this thesis is an intra-generic text presenting the fictionalised narrative of a cycle expedition the author made from Salford to the Greek island of Ikaria in the summer of 2010. This substantial work aims to interrogate, imagine and enquire into the epistemology of a post-climate-change world.