Environmental Crisis and Vocabularies of Transformation in Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo-American Speculative Fiction

Objective

In the face of accelerating climate change, it is realistic to consider ways in which individuals and society could adapt to living in transformed environments. Ostensibly about the future, 21st century speculative fiction actually contemplates what could be done right now in response to such environmental crises. The potential of ecological speculative fiction to cause readers to imaginatively grapple with environmental crises, and thus potentially to influence their emotions, dispositions, and behaviors regarding them, has been established; however, such effects and the precise textual features that kindle them have been under-researched. ECOTRANS investigates how ecological speculative fiction from Japanese, Finnish, and Anglo-American cultural contexts enables readers to re-imagine and re-engage with climate change by uncovering distinct vocabularies of ecological transformation in a multi-lingual corpus. In doing so, this project connects culturally specific thematizations of environmental crisis to readers’ imaginative and agential possibilities. This project applies an interdisciplinary, corpus-driven methodology that integrates ecolinguistics, which offers a framework for understanding the activist potential of language; corpus stylistics, which enables scalable, retrievable, and replicable analysis; and science fiction studies, which brings insight into how speculative language shapes reader imaginaries. At the heart of the approach is the concept of vocabularies of ecological transformation – lexical and grammatical patterns that express culturally specific ways of imagining and responding to environmental change. This comparative and corpus-stylistic study will produce new insight into the role of language in shaping ecological imagination and adaptation by illuminating culturally and linguistically specific lexical strategies for speculative engagement with ecological crises and transformations.