Re-E-Mergence: The Climate Crisis as a Passage to Narrative and Cultural Renewal

This dissertation explores how speculative fiction aids in reimagining the communication and narration of the climate crisis, proposing Re-E-Mergence as a conceptual framework for cultural transformation. Through the analysis of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2017), Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013), and Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), the present PhD thesis examines how the genre offers narrative tools to resist commodified, anthropocentric climate discourses and opens imaginative spaces for rethinking the relationship between human and nonhuman lives. Re-E-Mergence, an original concept developed in this research project, describes a process of transformation that moves through darkness—understood as uncertainty, collapse, and ontological disruption—toward the possibility of narrative and cultural renewal. Drawing on critical perspectives such as Adorno’s negative dialectics and dialectics of enlightenment (Adorno, 1997; 2004), Didi-Huberman’s Survival of the Fireflies (Didi-Huberman, 2018), Haraway’s posthumanism (Haraway, 2016), McIntyre’s analysis of post-truth (McIntyre, 2018), Per Espen Stoknes’ work on climate psychology and narrative (Stoknes, 2015), Rebecca Solnit’s reflections in Hope in the Dark (Solnit, 2016), Evelyne Grossman’s theory of crisis as a space of instability and creative potential (Grossman, 2020), and Sally Gillespie’s work on climate crisis consciousness (Gillespie, 2019), this research project investigates the symbolic and philosophical role of darkness as a necessary condition for breaking through the limits of contemporary anthropocentric consumeristic rationalism and enabling new forms of ecological posthuman imagination. The analysis unfolds following a theoretical trajectory that mirrors that of Re-E-Mergence itself: from Annihilation’s descent into the dark and dissolution of anthropocentric frameworks in favor of posthuman ones, to The Circle’s critique of light as transparency, surveillance, and control, and finally to The Year of the Flood’s work of re-stor(y)ation, which brings together adaptive posthuman narratives, an awareness of ecological interdependence, imaginative explorations of dark ecology, and renewed ways of relating to and becoming-with and within the world, that embrace uncertainty and the unknown. 7 Together, these texts reject the dominant anthropocentric and capitalist narrative of historical and societal progress and growth as linear, continuous, and inherently positive; instead, they offer a model of transformation that is grounded in moments of breakdown, of crisis, of honest confrontation, and embraces the slow, imaginative work of rebuilding meaning in a world left with none. By interweaving speculative fiction, climate crisis communication, along with insights from philosophy and psychology, work presented here argues that the Re-E-Mergence framework reveals how stories that embrace uncertainty and complexity, can unsettle dominant cultural narratives through their darkness, fostering ecological and posthuman awareness, and creating an opening for imagining more adaptive, resilient, and co-created futures in times of ecological crisis.