Narrating Nuclear Disaster : Literary Form and Affective Modes after Chernobyl and Fukushima

Sammanfattning: The major nuclear disasters of Chernobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011) play an important role in the public perception of nuclear power, yet their social and material impacts remain scientifically debated and, thus, their meaning for the future of nuclear power production contested. Narrating Nuclear Disaster intervenes in these debates by asking what might be learned about nuclear disasters through an analysis of the formal and affective strategies employed in literary texts narrating their aftermath. The study operates under two assumptions: First, literary narratives productively negotiate risks which are both sensorily imperceptible and scientifically and socially contested, such as the effects of radioactive contamination after a nuclear disaster. And second, these negotiations happen not only thematically, but also on a formal level, for instance via metafictional narrative devices or genre conventions, and via the affective mode of the text. The project is positioned within multiple critical discourses, namely within the context of, and somewhat in opposition to, early nuclear criticism of the 1980s; within contemporary ecocriticism; within (ecocritical) affect studies, and within the energy humanities. Combining econarratological, new formalist, and more context-oriented ecocritical methods, I explore how nuclear narratives “give form” to the environmental as well as the ontological and epistemological problems that arise from nuclear disaster experiences.Taking a transnational, nonchronological, and event-based approach allows me to identify common themes and formal features in nuclear disaster narratives beyond national nuclear discourses. Narrating Nuclear Disaster offers literary analyses ranging from widely-read texts like Christa Wolf’s Störfall (1987) or Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) to “low brow” genres such as thrillers and humorous travelogues about journeys to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Overall, I find that the studied literary texts furnish nuclear disaster discourses with scenarios and images that favor uncertainty over closure and foster affective engagement not geared toward catharsis, but towards ambiguity. In doing so, they present a commentary on scientific and political nuclear disaster narratives which are oftentimes prone towards resolution and closure.