Daejeon, July 27–31
This research project, “Methodological Reflections for Archiving Anthropocene Narratives,” develops a digital archive and analytical framework for examining how the Anthropocene is narrativized in contemporary literature. The Anthropocene—a term in use since the early 2000s—designates a proposed geological epoch in which anthropogenic environmental change threatens the conditions of life on Earth (Crutzen and Stoermer; Crutzen; Thomas et al.). While the concept originates in Earth system science, it has increasingly functioned as a cultural narrative through which societies explain ecological crisis, responsibility, and possible futures.
The project systematically collects and annotates a growing corpus of contemporary climate-related fiction in order to map how writers imagine, contest, and reframe the planetary ecological crisis. By treating annotation and categorization as interpretive acts rather than neutral metadata, the archive offers a methodological experiment in how literary narratives of the Anthropocene can be analyzed, visualized, and compared.
The project is premised on recent scholarship that understands the Anthropocene not only as a scientific designation but also as a story—a narrative structure that organizes causality, responsibility, and agency (Bonneuil; Dalby; Kunnas; Dürbeck). This perspective assumes that fictional works, as well as theoretical and historical discourses on climate change, convey distinct narrative logics. These narratives are performative: the way a story explains “how we arrived here” shapes how readers imagine whether—and by whom—the crisis can be addressed.
Narrative analysis in this project focuses on dramaturgical elements: where a story begins and ends, which actors and forces are foregrounded or backgrounded, how causality is framed, and what moral or political horizons are implied.
To organize competing narratives of the Anthropocene, the project adopts and critically applies the four narrative types identified by Christophe Bonneuil (Bonneuil):
This dominant narrative presents humanity (Homo sapiens) as a unified geological force that has altered the Earth system. Functioning as an Enlightenment-style story, it emphasizes scientific knowledge and technological innovation as pathways toward planetary stewardship. Critics note that this narrative often remains ahistorical and apolitical, obscuring unequal responsibility and power relations.
This narrative argues that extensive human intervention has rendered traditional distinctions between nature and culture obsolete. It encompasses eco-modernist approaches (Asafu-Adjaye et al.), which frame ecological crisis as an opportunity for technological management and growth, as well as posthumanist perspectives (Latour; Haraway) that embrace human–nonhuman hybridity and call for new ontologies of coexistence.
Eco-catastrophist narratives emphasize irreversible damage, planetary boundaries, and the possibility of civilizational collapse or human extinction. Often anti-growth and anti-modern, these narratives adopt an apocalyptic tone and foreground limits, vulnerability, and the fragility of Earth systems.
This narrative situates ecological crisis within the contradictions of global capitalism. Associated with theorists such as Jason W. Moore, it reframes the Anthropocene as the Capitalocene, arguing that environmental devastation is rooted in the expansion of capitalist world-systems and imperial extraction since the sixteenth century (Moore). It highlights historically specific actors, economic structures, and unequal ecological exchanges.
Literary works are often hybrid and may be associated with more than one narrative type; the archive explicitly accommodates such overlaps in order to reflect the complexity of contemporary climate fiction.
The second component of the project is the construction of a web-accessible digital archive, the Climate Story Lab, which functions both as a research tool and a public-facing resource.
The archive currently focuses on English-language novels published since 1990 that address climate change, biodiversity loss, ecological collapse, and posthuman or post-apocalyptic futures. The corpus of climate fiction has expanded rapidly in recent decades, yet no up-to-date, comprehensive archive exists that systematically organizes recent publications. While the current focus is literary fiction, the project is designed to expand to other art forms and translated works.
As of December 2025, the archive contains approximately 40 works and will be significantly expanded by the time of the presentation (July 2026).
The archive is built using “Obsidian” and “Obsidian Publish,” which allow flexible note-taking, hyperlinking, visualization, and public dissemination. The Climate Story Lab is accessible online and designed for use by researchers, students, and general readers.
Each work in the archive is documented in an individual file containing standardized properties, including: Author; Title; Publication date; Synopsis; Thematic and formal tags (e.g., biodiversity, realism, dystopia, multi-species narration); Assignment to one or more Anthropocene narrative types (naturalist, post-nature, eco-catastrophist, eco-Marxist)
Narrative classification is treated as an interpretive decision informed by close reading rather than as a rigid taxonomy.
The archive’s core data is visualized through Obsidian’s Graph View, where nodes represent works, narrative types, and thematic tags. This enables users to explore relationships across the corpus—for example, identifying clusters of eco-catastrophist fiction or tracing the rise of post-nature narratives over time.
The presentation will demonstrate how the archive can be used to map shifts in dominant Anthropocene narratives in recent fiction; to identify recurring thematic and formal trends by using the “tags” (key themes and formal elements identified and annotated by myself); and to provide a foundation for further digital analysis, including topic modeling and network analysis.
By combining narrative theory with digital archiving, this project proposes a methodological framework for studying Anthropocene literature that is both interpretive and infrastructural. The Climate Story Lab offers not only an archive of climate fiction but also a reflective tool for examining how stories shape contemporary ecological imagination and political possibility.