Date of Award

5-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English

Department

English

First Advisor

Karem, Frederick

Second Advisor

Carnell, Rachel

Third Advisor

Burrell, Julie

Abstract

Both literary and scientific texts often demonstrate the powerful role that stories serve in helping to shape humanity’s beliefs and behaviors. In his climate fiction novel Appleseed (2021), Matt Bell deploys the polyphonic method to follow three main character storylines. This technique provides the opportunity for heteroglossic dialogue, and Bell also utilizes metaponsdialogue to ensure the reader is invested and understands his/her complicity and function in the climate emergency, which leads to a reflection on personal responsibility and culpability. Theories from Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel” from his collection called The Dialogic Imagination support the examination of multi-perspective texts. Additionally, French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argues that in the age of modernity, people should move away from metanarratives and toward scientific findings as well as localized stories told by a diverse cross-section of the population to determine truth and credibility. Bell weaves Western metanarratives, such as Pagan mythology, Judeo-Christian religious doctrine, and capitalistic tales in the form of the American Dream, throughout his novel, and the nature of these narratives is anthropocentric. Bell comingles the plotlines, narratives, and timelines, and culminates the events into a global disaster based on current climate change theory and fact as presented and supported by Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prizewinning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History and Naomi Klein’s text This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Scientific theory reinforces that believing in and acting according to these anthropocentric narratives holds dangerous systematic consequences. When these narratives and multi-perspective tales are in conversation with one another, they reveal Bell’s ultimate warning: these narratives are anthropocentric in nature, and adhering our identities and value systems to these narratives will bring about the downfall of mankind.

In Matt Bell’s Appleseed (2021), the author uses a polyphonic approach to warn Western civilization that the powerful narratives we have been telling for centuries are anthropocentric and will lead to humanity’s demise. Bell uses the polyphonic method to revisit and amend both familiar and unfamiliar narratives that empower or challenge humanity’s anthropocentrism; to meet the fierce urgency of scientific warnings about climate change, he revises and undermines the current mainstream narrative theory that technology will save humanity from its doom.

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