The future is weird: Jeff Vandermeer, science, ritual, and the strangeness of climate crisis
Change is scary.
As we push ourselves past climate tipping points and end what once seemed like immutable normalities, weird fiction has made a notable comeback. Through the frightening weird ecologies of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series (the source material for the film Annihilation, dir. Alex Garland), this talk argues that leaning into both the horror and excitement of strangeness is key to addressing crises.
Guiding you through the strange roots of the weird literary tradition and drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, I argue that we can look to VanderMeer’s Area-X as a necessary confrontation with the limits of our reality. My talk will particularly focus on how his fiction inverts the uncanny and explores the way ritual, science and faith appears when faced with the Real. This weird aesthetic, what I call the eco-weird,models how we can come to terms with the horror of breaking our unsustainable reality so we can pursue a strange but better future—if we dare.
Speaker Bio:
Juni Kvarving is a researcher, writer, and editor. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Kent about the narrative aesthetics of climate emergency and tipping points in contemporary American utopian novels. Alongside her research, she co-directed the New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Network (NVPoco), worked at Wasafiri Magazine for International Contemporary Writing, edited for Holland House Books, and taught as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Kent and Course Instructor at CIEE London. Juni is currently interested in nostalgic aesthetics and the environment, and is co-editing a forthcoming special issue on “The American Dream/American Nightmare” with the European Journal of American Culture. Website: https://junikvarving.com/
Curated & Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
