Climate Change. Tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse on Social Media


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Department of English and American Studies), course: Text & Discourse Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This paper delves into the highly debated topic of climate change and its communication across social media, particularly on the platform X (formerly Twitter). Recognizing the profound global implications of climate change discourse, the study focuses on linguistic analysis at the lexical level, examining semantic patterns in environmental discourse. The goal is to identify distinctive language devices, including lexemes, phrases, clauses, figures of speech, and idiomatic expressions, and link them to the discourse categories of tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse as defined by Foust and O'Shannon. The analysis involves closely examining selected Tweets from the database, aiming to categorize them based on these discourse frames. The paper outlines the methodology, defines discourse framing and environmental discourse categories, and concludes with a summary of findings and an outlook on communication modalities in the current discourse about climate change on social media.




Climate Change. Tragic and Comic Apocalypse in Environmental Discourse on Social Media


Book Description

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, http: //www.uni-jena.de/ (Department of English and American Studies), course: Text & Discourse Linguistics, language: English, abstract: This paper delves into the highly debated topic of climate change and its communication across social media, particularly on the platform X (formerly Twitter). Recognizing the profound global implications of climate change discourse, the study focuses on linguistic analysis at the lexical level, examining semantic patterns in environmental discourse. The goal is to identify distinctive language devices, including lexemes, phrases, clauses, figures of speech, and idiomatic expressions, and link them to the discourse categories of tragic and comic apocalypse in environmental discourse as defined by Foust and O'Shannon. The analysis involves closely examining selected Tweets from the database, aiming to categorize them based on these discourse frames. The paper outlines the methodology, defines discourse framing and environmental discourse categories, and concludes with a summary of findings and an outlook on communication modalities in the current discourse about climate change on social media




Discourses of Global Climate Change


Book Description

This book examines the arguments made by political actors in the creation of antagonistic discourses on climate change. Using in-depth empirical research from Sweden, a country considered by the international political community to be a frontrunner in tackling climate change, it draws out lessons that contribute to the worldwide environmental debate. The book identifies and analyses four globally circulated discourses that call for very different action to be taken to achieve sustainability: Industrial fatalism, Green Keynesianism, Eco-socialism and Climate scepticism. Drawing on risk society and post-political theory, it elaborates concepts such as industrial modern masculinity and ecomodern utopia, exploring how it is possible to reconcile apocalyptic framing to the dominant discourse of political conservatism. This highly original and detailed study focuses on opinion leaders and the way discourses are framed in the climate change debate, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of environmental communication and media, global environmental policy, energy research and sustainability.




The Uninhabitable Earth


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The Uninhabitable Earth hits you like a comet, with an overflow of insanely lyrical prose about our pending Armageddon.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • The Economist • The Paris Review • Toronto Star • GQ • The Times Literary Supplement • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews It is worse, much worse, than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible—food shortages, refugee emergencies, climate wars and economic devastation. An “epoch-defining book” (The Guardian) and “this generation’s Silent Spring” (The Washington Post), The Uninhabitable Earth is both a travelogue of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress. The Uninhabitable Earth is also an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation—today’s. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD “The Uninhabitable Earth is the most terrifying book I have ever read. Its subject is climate change, and its method is scientific, but its mode is Old Testament. The book is a meticulously documented, white-knuckled tour through the cascading catastrophes that will soon engulf our warming planet.”—Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times “Riveting. . . . Some readers will find Mr. Wallace-Wells’s outline of possible futures alarmist. He is indeed alarmed. You should be, too.”—The Economist “Potent and evocative. . . . Wallace-Wells has resolved to offer something other than the standard narrative of climate change. . . . He avoids the ‘eerily banal language of climatology’ in favor of lush, rolling prose.”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times “The book has potential to be this generation’s Silent Spring.”—The Washington Post “The Uninhabitable Earth, which has become a best seller, taps into the underlying emotion of the day: fear. . . . I encourage people to read this book.”—Alan Weisman, The New York Review of Books




Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric


Book Description

Intellectuals today cringe when a politician speaks of the Second Coming, the millennium, or the Antichrist. Certain questions naturally arise about those who literally expect the end of the world in our day: Why do they think this? Why do some people believe them? How do their exhortations work to persuade an audience and to move that audience to actions and commitments? These are the motivating questions of Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric, which describes apocalyptic as a rhetorical genre of discourse. Barry Brummett first recasts insights drawn from past scholarly and theological studies to demonstrate their relevance to contemporary apocalyptic, then examines a variety of real apocalyptic to illustrate the ways in which these rhetorical discourses actually work. The discussion focuses on those strategies, arguments, and stylistic features that are peculiar to apocalyptic and that support its social and political claims. Following an introductory first chapter, Chapter Two describes how apocalyptic rhetoric links a psychological context to an esoteric grand order underlying all of time and the cosmos. Chapter Three compares premillennial and postmillennial apocalyptic on three dimensions to show the different approaches they take to reach their audiences. Chapter Four describes specific rhetorical techniques designed to maintain a mystic persona and urge social and political commitments on audiences. The final two chapters apply the author's theories to secular and religious apocalyptic, both premillennial (Hal Lindsey and Ravi Batra) and postmillennial (Francis Fukuyama). Contemporary Apocalyptic Rhetoric will appeal to readers across many disciplines, including communications, religion, sociology, and psychology.




The Flood Myth


Book Description




Echoes Across the Valley


Book Description




Healing Capitalism


Book Description

The global response from business to social and environmental issues during the past decade has created a corporate responsibility movement. But what has been the impact of this movement? The financial crisis that began in 2007 has led more and more people to question the fundamentals of our economic system. Now, some within the corporate responsibility movement are developing a vision and practice of a new form of capitalism, one that will require collective action to achieve. Bendell and Doyle draw on Lifeworth's annual reviews of corporate responsibility and explain how business leaders, stakeholders and related academe now need to experiment with new models that address the fundamental flaws of contemporary capitalism, including monetary systems, enterprise ownership, and regulation. This book will be a fantastic resource for business libraries, as it records and analyses key events, issues and trends in corporate responsibility during the first decade of the 21st century. It is a sequel and companion to Bendell's previous work, The Corporate Responsibility Movement.




The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment


Book Description

Offers an overview of American environmental literature across genres and time periods, introducing readers to a range of ecocritical methodologies.




The Anticipation of Catastrophe


Book Description

Since the 1980s, "risk" has been one of the most productively employed categories of analysis in the social sciences. Risk theory and risk research in these disciplines have shown that pervasive risk awareness has increasingly reconfigured societies, politics, and cultures in our period of late modernity. The essays assembled in this volume extend risk research in the humanities to literary and cultural studies and analyze a wide range of literary and audiovisual texts that imagine human encounters with environmental risk in North America. They are grouped into three sections. The first section focuses on representations of the risk of global climate change in several climate change novels; the second section concentrates on the representation of the nuclear risk in non-fictional and fictional texts as well as in film; the third section draws particular attention to the relevance of genre in the representation of a variety of environmental risks, genres ranging from poetry to posthuman fiction to Hollywood disaster movies and video games.




Recent Books