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What is Setting in Cli-Fi? Transcript (English Subtitles Available in Video)
By Case Pharr and Amanda Younglund
MA Students in Literature & Culture
Setting typically refers to the time and place in which a narrative occurs, and it’s often the third item in a triad alongside character and plot. As Professor Malewitz highlights in his literary terms video, setting is a formal feature that indirectly shapes and molds the other parts of a narrative. Characters, plot, and tonality are inherently affected by the world around them, emphasizing the ability of setting to form a narrative. While the example professor Malewitz uses in his video is a natural setting, settings may also include man made spaces. For example, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, the various characters interact by moving around 1920’s London. Things such as the bell tolling the hour or certain streets intersecting cause and shape shifts in the point of view of the novel. The post-WWI time-period also exerts itself upon the narrative by affecting various characters who suffer from PTSD, possess certain ideas about the British Empire, and dress in ways that identify them as belonging to this time period. It is important to note that in this example as well as Professor Malewitz’s example, setting remains a background feature which operates upon the characters and plot in a somewhat indirect manner, thus positioning setting as outside of the agency, or ability to act directly, which we associate with human characters.
However, setting in climate fiction – literature which centers anthropogenic or man-made climate change – operates in ways that challenge this “background” designation. Before we begin to discuss this change within literature, it is also important to note how climate change affects our ideas about time and place in the real world. As historian Dipesh Chakrabarty notes, humans have become geologic agents, a status which changes the way we see the world. Here “geologic agency” refers to the newfound ability to enact lasting global changes to the environment.
Chakrabarty argues climate change is the speeding up of the typically slow rate of geologic change. As the rate of geologic change approaches that of a human lifetime, even small choices that humans make have global consequences which are reflected in the world around us. As a result, human geologic agency becomes more and more apparent and important as climate change becomes more and more pronounced.
What we have just discussed has more to do with the temporal nature of climate change, or the way that climate change causes us to think about time in a different way, but geologic agency also has consequences for the space around us. Knowing that human agency is reflected in nature due to newfound geologic agency allows us to understand the world around us as able to come alive or become agential. When we experience weird weather such as hurricanes, wildfires, or droughts, they no longer just feel like a part of the process of a natural world. Instead, these formerly natural elements seem to be acting in response to human geologic agency. For example, when we go outside and feel extreme heat we no longer take it for granted and now think of it as connected to climate change. In this way, understanding climate change changes the world around us both temporally and spatially.
With this in mind, let's return to the context of climate change literature aka cli-fi. As should be obvious by now, the way that geologic agency typically appears within a narrative is the setting. Rather than existing as a background category that affects characters and other agents indirectly, setting now becomes an agent itself. Let me offer an example of this in action. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is set in rural Appalachia during a butterfly migration. This migration has been diverted thousands of miles from where it normally goes due to climate change, choosing to roost in the mountains in Tennessee and become a part of the landscape.
This change provides an initial example of geologic agency for us. Like we laid out earlier, this ability to directly affect environmental change denoted by the term geologic agency becomes possible when the rate of change of the natural world catches up with human lifetimes. Normally changes in migration patterns take place over thousands of years, but within the space of this novel, they now occur due to climate change over the course of a single year, spelling a dramatic shift for the lives of butterflies on earth. This massive change in a short period of time is representative of the kind of geologic agency that we have been discussing.
The context of literature also allows us to see the way that the agency of the setting directly changes both characters and the shape of the narrative itself. Throughout Flight Behavior we see many characters whose lives are dramatically changed due to the migration: a butterfly scientist moves to Tennessee to study the butterflies, jobs are created by the migration, people travel from all over the world to see the butterflies, and the family who owns the land where they roost are thrown into disarray by the migration. Similarly, the setting also changes the narrative structure. Because the butterflies need a specific range of temperatures to survive and they have gone to a different place than they normally would, characters are forced to check the temperature every morning which becomes a major part of the plot. Suspense is built up around the temperature change, but also conflict between human characters arises due to the interactions caused by the routing of taking the temperature. In this way, we can see the setting operating in a new way. Rather than passively affecting the story by just being the time and place where the story occurs, setting now exists alongside the characters as something which exhibits an ability to act independent from other elements. This raises important questions for us when we think about telling stories in the age of climate change. How do our definitions of setting and character change because of climate change? What counts as a character and what counts as a setting? Does climate change shift the way you see settings in non-Cli-Fi contexts? What are some other texts in which you see settings operating differently? We would love to hear from you in the comments section of the video!
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Pharr, Case and Amanda Younglund. "What is Setting in Cli-Fi?" Oregon State Guide to Climate-Change Literature, edited by Rachael Garcia, 14 Jun. 2024, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-setting-cli-fi-definition-and-examples. Accessed [insert date].
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