S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL Meteorologies of Modernity Introduction Weather and Climate in the Anthropocene What can literature and literary studies contribute to the study of meteorology, of weather and climate discourses, and the Anthropocene? Of all the terms used in the title of this volume, only ‘modernity’ belongs to the domain of the humanities in the classic sense, all the others form part of the sciences. Yet, as no one can deny, descriptions of weather, climate change and climate catastrophes have always played a central role in Western literature - especially in the genre of the novel but also in poetry and drama - even to the extent that, in 1892, Mark Twain ironically declared in the opening pages of his novel The American Claimant that “no weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather”(Twain vi). Twain elaborates that literary descriptions disrupt the flow of the narrative and thus pose a problem to both author and reader. Also, as Twain argues, weather descriptions should be handled by “qualified and recognized experts” - obviously, Twain wrote these lines at a time when literary imaginations of the weather were increasingly put under pressure by the emerging discipline of meteorology that claimed not only to scientifically analyze but also to be able to predict the changing behavior of the atmosphere. 1 Yet, even Twain concedes that “weather is necessary to a narrative of human ex-perience” (vi). Exploring the relationships between the three components that Twain mentions here - weather, narrative, and human experience - is the objective of our volume. As Mike Hulme reminds us in his latest book Weathered: Cultures of Climate (2017), what we tend to forget in times of climate change and global warming is that weather and climate, besides being an object of scientific study, have to be thought of first and foremost in their cultural dimension (Hulme xii). Even weather, arguably the more concrete phenomenon of the two because it can be felt bodily, is difficult to grasp and can mostly be experienced in the effects it has on other things. As Christina Rossetti already wrote in 1872: “Who has seen the wind? / Neither I nor you/ But when the leaves hang trembling/ The wind is passing through” (Rossetti 250). As abstract entities, climate and weather cannot be thought of inde- 1 See also Schulz. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 2 pendently of the ways they are recreated, studied and acted upon in the human imagination - a task that humankind has performed through the ages and cultures, in different disciplines and through different media but also, and perhaps most notably, in literature. The current era of environmental transition on a planetary scale, now generally referred to as the Anthropocene, only intensifies the representational challenge that climate has always posed to the human imagination. As Hulme writes, “[c]limate change should rather be seen as the latest stage in the cultural evolution of the idea of climate, an idea which enables humans to live with their weather through a widening and changing range of cultural and material artefacts, practices, rituals, and symbols” (xiii). A contemporary example of how atmospheric conditions and the human enter into a symbolic relationship can be found in the highly acclaimed novel of American-Nigerian writer Teju Cole, Open City (2011). In this narrative, we follow the young New Yorker psychiatrist Julius on his random walks through the cities of New York and Brussels and his reflections on their divergent histories. As someone who explores his environment on foot, the protagonist also shows a marked interest in weather-related phenomena - bird migrations (Cole 3), the change of seasons and the influence of light on his well-being (193-94), and - last but not least - climate change. In a passage early in the book, the protagonist reflects upon the extraordinarily warm November weather in New York. His thoughts show a marked insecurity about how to conceptualize the link between weather and climate, an insecurity triggered by the current debates on climate change: I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at their most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought to be cold, was something I now sensed as a sudden discomfort. The idea that the weather was changing noticeably bothered me, even if there was as yet no evidence that this warm fall in particular wasn’t due to a perfectly normal variation in patterns that stretched across centuries. There had been a natural little ice age in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, and so, why not a little warm age in our own time, independent of human causes? (Cole 28) Here, the absence of cold weather in November is experienced as a loss of order, although, as the narrator himself admits, it could also just be a variation in pattern. Yet, the protagonist hesitates to relate the oddly warm November weather directly to the climate changes that happen on a grander scale. Although explaining that he is not any longer the global warming skeptic that he used to be, he is suspicious about people who “draw the link too easily”: “I still couldn’t tolerate the tendency some had of jumping to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence: global warming was a fact, but that did not mean it was the explanation for why a given day was warm” (28). Introduction 3 Several issues are at stake here that are also of concern to our volume. First, the relationship between weather and climate. Although weather forms part of climate, we only have physical, i.e. bodily and sensory access to the first one; climate itself can neither be shown nor felt. As Mike Hulme remarks, in contrast to the unsteadiness of local weather, “climate hint[s] at a physical reality that is both more stable and durable than the weather. […] The idea of climate connects material and imaginative worlds in ways that create order and offer stability to human existence” (2). Yet, weather, precisely due to its transience and unsteadiness, can only hint to the larger patterns that we associate with climate. Considering climate change, the situation gets even more intricate: this process is of such complexity and vastness in scale that it utterly lacks phenomenal concreteness. As Eva Horn writes in her contribution to the present volume, “climate change […] can neither be felt nor seen, nor can its potential consequences be clearly outlined or anticipated” (66). It is due to the elusiveness of climate change that Julius, the protagonist of Open City, is indecisive about whether he should read the warm New York fall as evidence of larger transformations in global climate or simply as a variation in the pattern. In times of climate change and global warming, the relationship between weather and climate might have to be reconceptualized entirely: When climate ceases to be a relatively stable force, weather, with its transience and unpredictability, might be reconsidered as more than a local and temporal manifestation of climate. Rather, weather becomes the most potent reminder that humans, although being able to change the world on a geological scale, are not in control of the unexpected consequences of their behavior. Second, what is also at stake in the passage from Open City quoted above is the relevance of climate and weather for the ways in which we invent ourselves. As Kathryn Schulz writes in an article in The New Yorker, “[t]hrough the ages, we have used weather in our stories to illuminate the workings of the universe, our culture, our politics, our relationships, and ourselves.” While ancient texts told weather stories in order to understand meteorological phenomena, with the advent of modernity, the role of weather in literary representations starts to change: It is used increasingly as a metaphor to explain ourselves (ibid.), as in the extensive weather imagery in Shakespeare’s King Lear or, as Johannes Ungelenk elaborates in this volume, in The Tempest, or the development of sociometeorological correspondence theories explored by Patrick Ramponi. In the passage from Cole’s Open City, the odd weather condition of an unusually warm November makes the protagonist reflect both on himself and on the condition of society as a whole: Still, the way my thoughts returned to the fact that it was the middle of November and I hadn’t yet had occasion to wear my coat made me wonder if, already, I was S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 4 one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy; it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence. (28) In a rather bold move, the narrator-protagonist establishes a link between an ‘unscientific’ handling of climate change and the propensity of a society to be easily manipulated by demagogues. Climate change, thus, is made a metonymic marker for the political and ethical dilemma of the present rather than for an environmental catastrophe in the future. What Julius’ reflections on the warm November weather in New York make clear is that, when thinking about the weather in our time, we can neither easily skip the issue of climate change nor easily come to terms with it. Nor is it possible to relegate it to the domain of scientific investigation and isolate it from other issues and ideologies that have shaped modernity and continue to transform our present - capitalism, imperialism, globalization, to name but a few. The social and environmental problems created by these ideologies and historical phenomena that we have come to see as the defining features of modernity, however, persist even if some people suggest that the Anthropocene marks the end of modernity. The task that the present volume therefore sets itself is to address the complexities of climate change from the perspective of literary and interdisciplinary cultural studies and through the medium of literature. We aim to do so by giving special emphasis to three different aspects: a theoretical consideration of the challenges the current era of environmental transition poses to the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that used to define the humanities; a historicizing perspective on current debates of climate change and weather, and - last but not least - a consideration of literature as a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries that helps bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view and to think through it both culturally, historically, and aesthetically. Theorizing, Historicizing and Aestheticizing the Climates of Modernity The theoretical angle that we propose in this volume is closely connected to recent discussions surrounding the relatively new concept of the ‘Anthropocene.’ The Anthropocene encapsulates and condenses many of the challenges that the large-scale transitions subsumed under the label ‘climate change’ pose to the disciplinary premises of the humanities. Recent seminal work by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the philosopher Bruno Latour, or literary scholars like Timothy Clark, points to the fact that the Anthropocene calls for Introduction 5 a reformulation and reconceptualization of the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that have shaped the humanities up until the twentyfirst century (Chakrabarty “Climate,” Latour, Clark). The Anthropocene, conceived of in the earth sciences and coined by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and the marine ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000, designates a new geochronological epoch which is characterized by the impact of human activities on the world’s ecology, geology and atmosphere. Central to the Anthropocene concept is the assumption that humans “wield a geological force” that influences “the most basic physical processes on the earth,” causing changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, rising sea levels and alterations of the climate (Oreskes qtd. in Chakrabarty, “Climate” 206-207). Different moments in human history have been suggested to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene. Proponents of the early Anthropocene hypothesis want to date it to the rise of agricultural civilizations, whereas the dominant Anthropocene narrative sees the Industrial Revolution in Europe with the invention of the steam engine and the ever-increasing use of fossil energy as the defining historical fact that marks humanity’s ascent to biospheric supremacy (Malm and Hornborg 63). While the concrete point of its beginning has not been decided yet, 2 the question of the Anthropocene concept’s interpretative usefulness and critical potential has nevertheless animated many discussions in a variety of academic fields, not least in the humanities. 3 In an age where the very subject of the humanities - the human - has changed its status to a geophysical force with scale effects that are difficult to imagine, let alone predict, the distinctions between nature and culture, human and natural history are being renegotiated. The humanities, hence, need to critically engage with these paradigm shifts and the field’s own necessary reorientation. Taken seriously, the Anthropocene calls for nothing less than a critical reassessment of what it means to be human and for consideration of what the shift in humanity’s geophysical agency entails. 2 In August 2016, the Anthropocene working group installed by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy recommended that the International Commission on Stratigraphy officially accept the Anthropocene as describing a new geological epoch (Carrington). However, to officially date the beginning of the new epoch, a “golden spike,” that is a particular point or time boundary discernible between different strata, must be found (“Working Group”). There are suggestions that go beyond the 1800s as well as suggestions to date the new epoch from the 1950s allowing it to be defined with respect to the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests that can be found in particular stratal sections (ibid.). 3 These debates manifest in the steadily rising number of essays, edited collections, and individual volumes as well as the publication of an eponymous journal dedicated to the new epoch, which not only carry the ‘Anthropocene’ as a trendy buzzword in their titles but critically engage with it. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 6 One of the central aporias of the new geological epoch lies at the heart of the concept itself. Since anthropos in Anthropocene is meant to acknowledge and emphasize the central role of humankind in the shaping of the planet’s geology and ecology, it is precisely the notion of the human, the anthropos, that is at stake here. For by becoming a geological force, human beings have collectively attained a form of existence that has no ontological dimension, as Chakrabarty persuasively argues. In his seminal article “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), he proposes to use “species” - in its antiessentialist Darwinian sense - to account for this non-ontological mode of being. However, conceiving of ourselves in terms of a species with a universal species history poses imaginative hurdles precisely because of it “pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience” (Chakrabarty, “Climate” 222). It is particularly this universal dimension of the species narrative that has provoked severe criticism from a number of scholars who disapprove of its de-historicizing and de-politicizing impetus. One of the quandaries constitutive of the Anthropocene is that its presumed ‘oneness’ of humanity as a geological agent does not imply a collective political agency. 4 Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg argue in their timely critique of the Anthropocene narrative that the use of the species category is inimical to action. First, the species narrative conflates the distinctions between nature and culture and thus loses the analytical value of keeping them separate (Malm and Hornborg 63), thereby forfeiting the possibilities of a cultural critique as it denaturalizes climate change by relocating it to the sphere of human activity, only to renaturalize it as “derived from an innate human trait” (65). More importantly, they remind us that “[i]ntra-species inequalities are part and parcel of the current ecological crisis” and must not be ignored in an attempt to understand and address it (62). 5 While Malm and Hornborg proceed to argue the case for the sociogenic quality of climate change (66, original emphasis), other critics like the political ecologist Jason W. Moore prefer to speak of the “Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’” (1), in order to stress the fact that the environmental crisis humanity faces as a whole is inextricably intertwined with the endless accumulation of capital in our capitalist world. 6 Both Malm and 4 See also Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial” 13-14. 5 Pointing to the fact that the historical origins of anthropogenic climate change rested upon highly inequitable global processes from the start (i.e. technological and industrial developments as well as the forceful processes that accompanied the integration of a large number of regions across the globe into the capitalist world system), Malm and Hornborg argue for a view that concedes the past and present role of combined and uneven development in the production of our current environmental crisis (63-64). 6 For Jason W. Moore, the shift in perspective from Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas which he finds to be definitive of the Anthropocene to a perspective that scrutinizes the dynamics of capitalism as a world ecology of power, capital, and nature is Introduction 7 Hornborg and Moore share an emphasis on questions of social justice and argue for a historically contextualized analyses of the present crises that, in their opinion, cannot be effectively addressed by way of the Anthropocene narrative and its focus on humanity as a ‘species.’ Similar to the criticism set forth above, a number of scholars in postcolonial and ecocritical studies have also reminded us that the effects of climate change - however global its effects might be - are distributed unequally and mediated by global and postcolonial inequities already in place (Nixon, Mukherjee). Consequently, at the “historical juncture” we find ourselves at right now, we need to think through “contradictory figures of the human” (Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies” 1, 5) to come to terms with the scope and complexities of anthropogenic consequences. With this in mind, the last three contributions in the present volume add to a postcolonial perspective on the Anthropocene discourse which critically intervenes in the basic ideological underpinnings that sustain inequalities in our time. Along with the philosophical challenges to our received notions of “the human” (and their socio-political implications) emerges a decisive change in our relation to time and space and to the natural world. If the interconnected, large-scale natural systems of air and oceanic currents that regulate the temperature on the globe must be re-conceptualized in terms of their cultural malleability, and human history conflates with the earth’s geostory, concepts like modernity automatically undergo refutation. Consequently, Latour emphatically describes the Anthropocene as what could become the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological political concept yet produced as an alternative to the notions of ‘Modern’ and ‘modernity.’ 7 Other critics also contend that the Anthropocene marks the end of modernity or more precisely, as Timothy Clark puts it, the closure of modernity in the sense of Derrida: “The epoch whose closure is at issue is that in which the finitude of the earth was ignored, discounted or forgotten” (132). According to Clark, climate change renders the intellectual structures that underpin the modern era both newly perceptible and philosophically exhausted (ibid.). For obvious reasons, most debates on climate now operate in a future tense and are driven by projections and extrapolations. 8 Yet, if, as critics like Latour and Clark have rather boldly suggested, we find ourselves at various end-points - not only the end-point of modernity but also the end-point of weather and climate as we know them - it seems appropriate to take a look beneficial in so far as it allows a historically contextualized analysis of the present crises which does not gloss over existing inequalities. 7 Latour writes: “[L’Anthropocène] peut devenir le concept philosophique, religieux, anthropologique et, comme nous allons le voir bientôt, politique le plus pertinent pour commencer à se détourner pour de bon des notions de ‘moderne’ et de ‘modernit’” (154). 8 See also Harris 18. S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 8 back. This is what the present volume seeks to do by offering a historicizing perspective to climate and climate change. Examining how earlier cultures and literatures have told stories about the weather and have related to the climate of their time and place, we do not only want to point to the different meanings climate can take on in different cultures and historical epochs but also aim to gain a deeper, culture-oriented understanding of what the focus on ‘change’ in contemporary discussions of climate entails historically, aesthetically, and politically. In fact, ‘climate’ might be just another signifier for ‘culture.’ As James Rodger Fleming and Vladimir Jankovic have pointed out, the contemporary definition of climate as statistical index is “an anomaly” (2). In the course of history, climate “has more often been defined as what it does rather than what it is” (ibid.). Rather than simply being an index of aggregated weather trends, the two historians of science argue that climate has more often been used as an agent - as an explanatory framework for human behavior, national character, economic growth, and for defining geographical ‘problem areas.’ 9 Or, in Mike Hulme’s words: “The idea of climate has been bound up with, inter alia, imperial power, chauvinism, identity, nationhood, diet, colonialism, trade, health and morality” (26). In short, climate retains a cultural dimension as it is connected to a number of areas relevant to human existence. As a consequence, one could argue that the idea of climate is intimately tied to power relations and that the current state of unprecedented climate apprehension tells us more about the state of the world’s social relations 10 than a general synopsis of weather. While we as scholars of the humanities can hardly contribute to the future projections and simulations of physical climate conducted by climate science, we can certainly contribute to a historical understanding of climate by investigating the metaphoricity and the varying meanings different cultures have assigned at different times to climatic phenomena. The third axis that we suggest in order to intervene in current debates about the role of the human in the Anthropocene is a focus on the arts, and particularly on literature. As recent publications like Alexandra Harris’ Weatherland: Writers and Artists Under English Skies (2015) have impressively shown, literature contains a huge meteorological archive where weather and climate knowledge is not only registered but also scrutinized and produced. It affords insight into the different ways people have related to climate and, thus, forms an important part of the cultural history of climate we have argued for above. Yet, the value of literature for an understanding of climate 9 See also Hulme 16-26. 10 This, of course, includes the privileged position and normative domain climate science has acquired over the centuries. The scientific status of meteorology and climate science has not always been undisputed, though as is explored in detail in Peter Moore’s historical account of nineteenth century meteorologists titled The Weather Experiment (2015). Introduction 9 and the situation of climate change we are facing today should not only be seen in historicizing the present but also in dramatizing the future. What has been identified as one of the main challenges in the era of the Anthropocene - the problem of scale that poses a challenge to the human imagination - feeds without doubt into the core domain of literature and the arts: the power - and the problem - of imagination and representation. As Kathryn Yusoff has argued, at a time when humans face the challenge to think of themselves both in terms of a subject and in terms of a geophysical force, aesthetics, with their capacity of experimentation and condensation, “provide a possible site and mode of sensibility for engaging with the temporal and material contractions of the Anthropocene” (383). The task that the present volume sets itself, then, is not only to look for the depiction of future scenarios of climate disaster in literature - what eco-fiction has often been associated with - but also to explore the aesthetic potential of literature for poetically capturing the disjunctions that mark the Anthropocene and, thus, help them enter representation. Moreover, in the light of persisting power structures and inequalities inherited from modernity that continue to persist even as we enter a new geological epoch, another focus of the literary analyses attempted in this book lies on exploring how works of literature fashion the imbrication of local places, ecologies, and cultural practices in larger global networks - like those called upon by climate change. 11 The focus of the present volume is certainly not restricted to a particular kind of genre fiction, such as cli-fi, or to a particular kind of approach, such as ecocriticism. The project rather is to explore the huge meteorological archive that literature provides us with in order to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural, political, and aesthetic meanings that have emerged in the discourse on weather and climate in the past as well as in the present. The contributions collected in this volume largely proceed by way of a close reading of a single text, situating its ideas against wider historical, cultural, scientific or aesthetic currents. While it has been justifiably argued that this method has its limits, 12 we hold that the historical and aesthetic scope that the essays collected here as a whole certainly answer the need to study representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational framework as several critics have put forward. 13 In fact, our volume’s unique and new feature, also new to the REAL yearbook series, is its comparative approach to the topic. The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles, including weather debates in the nineteenth 11 See also Heise, Sense 210. 12 For a criticism regarding the method of close reading with regard to climate change, see Trexler and Johns-Putra 189. 13 See, e.g., Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities.” S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 10 century as well as the contemporary cli-fi novel, and with regard to a broad range of geographical contexts. As representatives of a variety of disciplines, such as German, Comparative, Scandinavian, British and American Literary Studies, the contributors adopt different methodological approaches to investigate the imaginative challenges of anthropogenic climate change and unpredictable weather, linking these with different philological concerns. With this interdisciplinary line-up, we aim to address the need for overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that major thinkers deem essential when debating the Anthropocene (cf. Clark 144). Reading Weather and Climate As pointed out above, anthropogenic climate change affects the methods, disciplinary boundaries and premises that used to define the humanities in at least three different ways: Firstly, by challenging the very distinction between nature and culture, human history and natural history. Secondly - and obviously related to the first point - by posing the challenge to think of human history and agency across multiple and incompatible scales at once, or as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, to think “disjunctively” about the human (“Postcolonial Studies” 2). Thirdly, anthropogenic climate change, as a profoundly abstract process, leaves us with the question of how to aesthetically and politically represent a phenomenon that is extraordinarily vast in temporal scale and extraordinarily complex and abstract in its effects and interrelations. The first three essays collected under the heading “Theorizing Weather and Climate Change” in this volume address all of these problems each with a different emphasis. The volume opens with a contribution by historian DIPESH CHA- KRABARTY, who initiated the ongoing discussion about the profound challenges and consequences of the Anthropocene for the humanities with “The Climate of History” (2009). In his essay “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Chakrabarty addresses the problem of different and incompatible scales of history that anthropogenic climate change prompts us to take into consideration simultaneously: “the history of the earth system, the history of life including that of human evolution on the planet, and the more recent history of the industrial civilization” (19). One result of the incommensurability of these differently scaled histories is the emergence of significant gaps - or “rifts,” as Chakrabarty calls them (21) - between cognition and action, which ultimately impede the development of a comprehensive politics of climate change. The major challenge is to translate the non-human scales that are constitutive of the two non-anthropocentric histories involved in anthropogenic climate change into a mode that is humanly experienceable in such a Introduction 11 way that they become meaningful and productive in the necessary fight against climate change. While he concedes that capitalism’s role in the emergence of the Anthropocene is undeniable, Chakrabarty contends that the capitalist history of late modernity cannot be considered the sole driver of such large-scale processes like planetary warming and makes a case for interplanetary research and thinking as more productive in the attempt to overcome the rifts in our thinking of the human in times of global warming. Taking anthropogenic climate change as a point of departure, ROBERT STOCKHAMMER argues that the central challenge for literary studies emerges from the diffusion of the boundary “between verum and factum, between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’” (44) and the need to respond to the shift in certainties that engagement with our anthropogenically shaped future has to confront. Stockhammer suggests three possible and necessary responses: the study of literary texts on climate change, the study of scientific texts on climate change, and the examination of prevailing rhetorical patterns in the dominant climate change discourse - which he understands to complement each other. He chooses to do the latter and proceeds to investigate three key terms crucial in contemporary climate change discourse: man, world, and we. Submitting these terms to a historical discussion, Stockhammer first explores the philosophical distinction between homo and anthropos and how each of these raises different implications about a climate-changing humanity. Second, by recourse to Humboldt’s meteorological studies in Kosmos, he discusses how the different conceptions of world and earth relate to humans and humanity as a geologically active force. Third, he critically discusses the ‘we’ of the anthropos that is the Anthropocene’s main premise and questions its presumed inclusivity. By scrutinizing the essential unrepresentability of climate change, EVA HORN conducts both a theoretical and a historical investigation into the trope of heat. As she argues, heat has been used politically as well as aesthetically to translate the very abstract processes of global warming into the realm of the graspable and imaginable. By analyzing the different implications of the thermal metaphor from Aristotle via Montesquieu to the present, Horn demonstrates the need to think of climate in terms of a cultural history that offers insight into the varying relationships between humankind and nature, cultures and climates, and into the different ways climate has been framed and been made to express itself. Horn’s essay lays out the theoretical groundwork for the “Historicizing Perspectives” that the next four essays in our volume offer. All look at representations of climate and weather in literary texts that were conceived long before the notion of climate change became virulent. JOHANNES UNGELENK takes a look at the immense meteorological archive that William Shakespeare has left us with in his work. By conducting a close S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 12 analysis of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Ungelenk constructs a proximity between the experience of unfamiliar and often hostile climates in the newly established British colonies and the experience produced in the relatively new cultural practice of early modern theatre. He reads Shakespeare’s theatre as a “hyper-space of climate” (98) that, like the rough climates experienced in the new world colonies, shake up the familiar climate at home and, ultimately, touch upon the body politic. A similar link between representations of weather and aesthetic practices, albeit with regard to another epoch and another genre, is explored in OLIVER GRILL’s contribution. With recourse to the inceptions of meteorological practice in Humboldt’s Kosmos, Grill engages with weather representations in Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (1857). Weather is not only one of the main topics Stifter’s characters discuss but also a central thematic device that animates and propels what remains of this novel’s plot. Grill explores this function by examining the way in which the unpredictability of weather undermines the idea of a cosmic order. He relates this meteorological contingency not only to the irreducible contingency specific to modernity but also to the genre of the novel, whose narrative structure, like meteorology, conventionally also works with patterns of expectation and fulfillment. Historically and culturally, the following contribution by SOLVEJG NITZKE remains in the same period. Nitzke investigates how the village stories of the Austrian writer Peter Rosegger register the modern developments in the rural nineteenth century Austrian countryside. Juxtaposing Rosegger’s seemingly sentimental and romanticizing fiction with the state of the art developments in meteorological science that are discussed in the country’s capital, Vienna, at that time, Nitzke opens up a tension that allows her to read meteorological events in Rosegger’s forest-fiction alongside the formalization and institutionalization of climatology. Rosegger’s texts, she argues, are not only an archive of contemporary cultural knowledge about weather and climate but also a commentary on modernization. Moreover, they provide an alternative perspective to the techno-industrial relationship towards nature that is calcifying throughout the late nineteenth century. Focusing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s assumed meteoropathy, PATRICK RAMPONI looks at the relationship between individual bodily experiences of weather and different climatic conditions, the meteorological knowledge of the late nineteenth century, and contemporary philosophical and cultural conceptions of how humans are influenced by weather and climate. After historically and culturally contextualizing the notion of sociometeorological correspondence, he illustrates the extent to which Nietzsche’s personal communication about his meteoropathy engages with weather and contemporary meteorology. In the philosopher’s correspondence, Ramponi argues, the main stance to weather is not primarily one that perceives it as a geophysical Introduction 13 phenomenon but rather as a psychophysiological one. This, in turn, makes Nietzsche rather skeptical towards the positivism of contemporary quantitative meteorology and the climatic and milieu-theoretical ideology of the nineteenth century. The next section, titled “Methods and Perspectives,” turns to contemporary negotiations of climate and climate change in literary fiction. Concerned with different genres - such as the contemporary cli-fi novel and photoembedded fiction - and various regions (North America, Europe’s northern regions, Africa, and Switzerland), the authors explore how contemporary literature relates aesthetically to the vast climatological shifts that affect the present. Focusing on the American author Paolo Bacigalupi and his novel The Water Knife (2015), ALEXA WEIK VON MOSSNER analyzes the implications of a dystopian vision of drought-ridden North America. The only essay to deal with the genre of cli-fi in a narrow sense, Weik von Mossner is not only interested in the estranged diegetic worlds this kind of fiction presents us with but also asks what kind of awareness-raising potential can be accorded to such novels. By taking up the approach of what she calls ‘cognitive econarratoloy,’ she argues that Bacigalupi’s dystopian novel aims at making its readers imaginatively experience the drastic effects of climate change on a visceral level. In contrast, REINHARD HENNIG is more concerned with the ethicopolitical implications than with aesthetic procedures of contemporary climate change fiction. The scholar of Scandinavian literature shows that the genre of climate change does not always serve the purpose of raising awareness for the devastating effects of climate change, but can also, as critics tend to forget, serve as an expression of the other end of the political scale, namely climate change denial. Focusing on the novel Chimera (2011) by Norwegian author Gert Nygårdshaug, Hennig also explores how strategies of climate change denial interrelate with other political ideologies such as islamophobia and the hope for totalitarian rule. Turning to the depiction of nature in Gerhard Richter’s and Alexander Kluge’s December (2010), URS BÜTTNER’s contribution engages with a recently published collaborative work by the artist and the writer that creatively brings together text and photography. Büttner explores how Kluge’s stories and Richter’s photographs that make up December individually and collectively challenge and subvert conventional narrative templates commonly used to narrate stories about nature. The author pays particular attention to how December frames and reframes the conditions for agency and events respectively. He argues that the photographs as well as the texts undermine commonplace patterns of narrating nature by redefining the parameters of S ARAH F EKADU , H ANNA S TRAß -S ENOL 14 human and non-human agency, throwing into relief what constitutes an event and, thereby, upsetting narrative coherence. Whereas the essays by Weik von Mossner, Hennig and Büttner explore literature that deals with the effects of climate change on humanity as a whole and on the way we tell stories about it, the contributions presented in the last section of our volume, “Postcolonial Responses,” focus on the question of how issues of difference - not only in the sense of colonial and environmental injustice but also in the incompatibility of global developments and local concerns - persist and are articulated in twentieth and twenty-first century literature and film. Focusing on Northern American film documentaries that deal with sinking islands in the Pacific due to sea level rise, ELIZABETH DE- LOUGHREY argues that most of these documentaries, despite their humble aim to raise awareness for the environmental catastrophe happening in the Pacific, display a colonial, patronizing attitude towards the Pacific Islands and their inhabitants. This, according to DeLoughrey, makes itself felt in both the images and the narratives chosen in order to represent the problem of the sinking islands. DeLoughrey sees a phenomenon she terms “imperialist nostalgia” (following Renato Rosaldo) operating at the heart of these documentaries, in which the main polluters, rather than taking a stance for the marginalized cultures and environments at stake, mourn that these exotic ‘island paradises’ no longer exist in the form they once entered colonial and exotic fantasies. Rereading Season of Migration to the North (1966/ 1969), the now classic postcolonial novel by Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih, with specific regard to representations of nature - particularly the desert - SARAH FEKADU asks to what extent literature is able to give us a sense of the confrontation between human and nonhuman scales that characterize the Anthropocene. She argues that in Season of Migration to the North, the colonial spatial conflict between East and West, North and South is gradually superimposed by the attempt to poetically capture a nonhuman realm whose temporality is withdrawn from human colonization and control, thus pointing its readers to the disjunctions that mark life in the Anthropocene. In her contribution on Linda Hogan’s novel People of the Whale, HANNA STRAß-SENOL analyzes how Hogan’s novel can be read as an allegory of climate change that differs from familiar types of climate change narratives. Commonly, much of contemporary climate change fiction adopts either the narrative of catastrophe or that of anticipation to comment on climate change - both narrative strategies are anticipatory and future-oriented. In contrast, Hogan’s text, Straß-Senol argues, addresses and mediates climate change risks by narrating a story of enduring crisis. She further explores how People of the Whale’s allegorical story embeds a critique of the exploitative and re- Introduction 15 source-depleting lifestyle of industrialized societies and advocates a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. Giving room to all these different perspectives, our volume does not attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question of how to conceptualize the relationship between climate and weather in the Anthropocene, a question also raised by Cole’s protagonist Julius in Open City. Rather it hopes to contribute to the discourse of climate change in the humanities on a variety of theoretical and practical levels. Works Cited Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 1-18 ---. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35.4 (2009): 197- 222. 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