Cultura

January 2023

Introduction to Narratives of Sustainability in the Anthropocene. Interdisciplinary Dimensions

Asun López-Varela AzcáratePages 7-13 ABSTRACT In his bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015), Yuval Noah Harari noted that one of the most important cognitive faculties in the human species is the development of imagination, a faculty that, together with human capability for establishing cause-effect relationships and turning them into stories, has enabled the […]

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The United Nations Narrative of Climate Change: The Logic of Apocalypse

Sanja IvicPages 15-26 ABSTRACT This paper emphasizes the crucial role that language use plays in climate change communication. In particular, this paper examines UN public discourse and narratives about climate change. It will be shown that the climate change is often described as a “threat to human wellbeing” and as an external enemy—the Other. On

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The Upcycling and Reappropriation – On Art-Specific Circular Economy in the Age of Climate Change

Janez StrehovecPages 27-41 ABSTRACT Whereas mainstream theories of environmental art and sustainable development consider art as a domain suitable for the application of environmentally friendly procedures, such as the circular economy, trash management and digitization, this research article focuses on the internal development of the autopoetic and self-referential art machine, which generates an art-specific sustainability.

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A Call for Sustainable Actions: The Voice of Little Things in Tom McCarthy Micro-story “Mermaid Figurine”

Asun López-Varela AzcáratePages 43-54 ABSTRACT This paper reveals the importance of stories associated to specific objects. The study argues that storytelling can infuse life and meaning into insignificant things. From a semiotic point of view, material objects become signs linked to particular people, experiences, desires, values, thus creating strong emotional bonds with the landscapes part

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Environmentality, Sustainability, and Chinese Storytelling

Weijie SongPages 55-66 ABSTRACT Environmentality teases out the multilayered human-environment contacts and connections in terms of human agency and governmentality, ecological objects and their (in)dependence, power/knowledge and environmental (in)justice. “Sustainable Development Goals” recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth

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Propositions for Sustainable Futures in Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam’s Bhimayana

Rina RamdevPages 67-80 ABSTRACT While critically examining the techno-scientific thrust that props the discourse of sustainability, this paper argues for the inclusion of the humanities and the imaginative counterworlds and complex ontological perspectives that literature offers. As Donna Haraway proposes, “we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities

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The Graphic Narrative of Liu Cixin, The Wandering Earth, and its Related Ecological Problems

Quingben LiPages 81-94 ABSTRACT Focusing on the ideological connotations and artistic techniques of the graphic novel The Wandering Earth, this paper discusses its adaptation from the literary work, and reveals its thoughts on the ecological problems and the sustainable development in the Anthropocene. Images in this graphic novel do not simply reproduce the externally visible

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Individualism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: the Highway to Unsustainability

Narie JungPages 95-106 ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s The Road demonstrates the centrality of individualism to the unsustainability that defines consumer culture in the Anthropocene. His representation of cannibalism not only reflects the main problems of consumer culture but also sheds light on individualism as its driving force. While the cannibalistic world of The Road presents a

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Meat, limits, and breaking sustainability: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife

Simon C. EstokPages 107-124 ABSTRACT Many environmental ills derive from humanity’s unsustainable fondness for meat, a fondness that often pushes (and sometimes breaks) environmental limits and reveals unsustainable patriarchal ideologies. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife each, in very different ways, expose the strands of “meat and gender” enmeshments in Korea

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The Role of Environment in Captain Marryat’s Novels and Victorian Culture

Seyyed Ali Khani Hoolari, Shamsoddin RoyanianPages 125-135 ABSTRACT The environment is one of the salient issues that continues to challenge the political and cultural aspects of the society. The question that interrogates this paper is whether environmentalism is a modern phenomenon or has existed from the past? The paper also exposes the importance of the

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