TWO SHORT RESEARCH PAPERS
'Growing Pains' – Sean O'Brien (University of Bristol)
As the climate crisis gathers steam, a heated debate has ignited among environmentalists over the question of economic growth. Eco-socialists contend that growth can be brought into balance with the ecosystem if the economy is subject to rational, democratic planning. Proponents of degrowth counter that, as carbon emissions appear to rise and fall with rates of economic growth, efforts should focus not on greening growth but on transitioning to a “post-growth” society. Despite this uptick in attention to the deep imbrication of fossil-fuelled growth and climate change, scholars in the humanities have only begun to bring this range of issues into conversation and to explore their representation in contemporary literature and culture. Growing Pains initiates a critical dialogue between degrowth theory and literary and cultural studies, approaching textual and visual media as privileged sites for the articulation of “degrowth imaginaries,” including my essay “Life After Growth: Racialised Foreclosure in Post-Katrina Climate Fiction."
'On a Hiding to Nowhere: Fantasy within Fantasy in Never Let Me Go' – Xiaoqiao Mu (University of Bristol)
As a clone made for organ-donations and denied subjectivity in an exploitative system, the protagonist-narrator Kathy in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go develops an excessive sense of nostalgia for her childhood boarding school, Hailsham, as a main coping mechanism to face the horror of her upcoming enforced organ-removal and death.
Throughout the first-person novel is an unrequited insistence: the line between Hailsham alumni should be ‘unbroken’ due to the love and care they receive from the school guardians. However, the guardians, to whom Kathy turns as the last resort for comfort, don’t really love her and her schoolmates—on the contrary, they are ‘all afraid of’ the clones. This paper explores Kathy’s reiterated act of throwing away and pulling back her ‘memory-reel’, as a compensatory ‘fort-da’ game that downgrades her demand for self-actualisation and progress into her desire to hold onto the edge of an old, framed photo, which is yet deceptive. The paper also asks about how Kathy’s mode of psychic inertia gives us insight into the way a radical societal stratification operates.