Tidsskrift for Kulturforskning (Aug 2022)
Framtidens former
Abstract
This article applies four different genre labels to an empirical material consisting of responses to qualitative questionnaires on climate change. The basic assumption is that genres shape our understandings of climate change, and accordingly that different genre labels highlight certain features of the texts while obscuring or ignoring others. Beginning with the term survey discourse as a subgenre of climate change narratives, this genre label stresses the underlying narrative structure of the responses, even though they are not narratives in a strict sense. The second term, prophecy or rather the prophetic mode, pinpoints the peculiar double temporality of many responses, resulting in a temporal loop in which the catastrophic future overshadows and partially determines the present while still leaving space for action. The third genre label, apocalypse, is more extreme than the prophetic mode, as its favoured temporality forecloses the possibility of influencing the future in any way. The fourth genre term, polyphonic interior monologue, underlines structural similarities of the responses with the literary interior monologue, and emphasizes their dialogical nature as they acknowledge the existence of other points of view.
