The Narrative Aesthetics of the Climate Tipping Point in Contemporary American Utopian Novels

In pursuit of understanding why climate crisis is, as Amitav Ghosh argues, so resistant to representation, this thesis provides a theoretical vocabulary to articulate how we are imagining the future in response to the strangeness of looming tipping points. The climate crisis is temporally tricky; by the time the consequences of climate change become visible and corporeally felt, it cannot be reversed and will likely already have set further damages into motion. Climate tipping points—the accumulation of smaller environmental changes into irreversible and often unknown changes to ecosystem functions—are likewise invisible until they are permanent. Avoiding them is pivotal to maintaining sustainable life on Earth. Once the rainforest tips into a savannah ecosystem, there is no going back, and the destruction of a carbon sink will cause global average temperatures to spike. To avoid climate tipping points, we might have to provoke societal tipping points; smaller changes which will, like climate tipping points, tip into larger permanent and often unknown, but hopefully sustainable changes. Climate tipping points are also likely to cascade into negative societal tipping points as people are forced to abandon their homes, livings, and unsustainable systems. In sum, no matter how the climate crisis plays out, we are heading towards tipping points in some form. Complicating the mitigation of climate crisis further, is our incapacity to imagine an alternative future to our current unsustainable capitalist system. Under what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, unknown or different realities, such as those beyond tipping points, do not just appear and feel strange, but unreal. This thesis utilises Lacanian psychoanalysis to map how impending tipping points are manifesting as what Raymond Williams calls ‘a structure of feeling’—a meaningful moment in history under construction—in contemporary narratives about the future of climate change. Using contemporary US utopian novels as case studies, my research outlines a theoretical framework which maps and defines three aesthetic manifestations of the tipping point structure of feeling on a spectrum of the defamiliarization of capitalist realism. These three aesthetics, ‘the uncanny game’, ‘the eco-weird’, and ‘the new normal’, attempt to negotiate the uncanniness of the tipping point and the complicit self under climate crisis.