From Apocalypse to Earthrise: Stories That Make Climate Matter
Stef Craps (Ghent University)
Abstract
What can stories do that facts and figures can’t? In the face of climate denial, despair, and disconnection, literature has the power to make the crisis feel real—urgent, personal, and emotionally resonant. This presentation explores how climate fiction, or “cli-fi,” helps us move beyond the limits of data-driven discourse by engaging narrative form to reframe how we perceive and relate to the climate emergency. From speculative futures to present-day realism, from poetic protest to experimental literary modes, fiction draws the crisis closer to home. It reveals the lived experience of climate disruption and prompts us to consider its uneven impacts across geographies, generations, and species. Through a range of examples—spanning dystopian collapse and utopian possibility, grief and defiance—the talk shows how fiction can foster critical reflection, challenge dominant assumptions, and make complex systemic issues more tangible. Literary texts do not merely depict the climate crisis; they intervene in it, offering language, perspective, and affective depth to a threat often rendered abstract or overwhelming. Whether by confronting extractivist logics, amplifying marginalized voices, or cultivating new forms of awareness and responsibility, stories shape how climate matters to us—and what futures remain possible.
Bio
Stef Craps is a professor of English literature at Ghent University, where he directs the Cultural Memory Studies Initiative. His research focuses on literature’s engagement with the afterlives of violence, drawing on memory and trauma studies, ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, and postcolonial and decolonial theory. He explores how literary and cultural texts respond to histories of injustice, suffering, and loss, and how they participate in processes of witnessing, repair, and reimagining. Craps is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the Novels of Graham Swift: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), a co-author of Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and a co-editor of Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (Berghahn, 2017). He has also (co-)edited special journal issues on topics including ecological grief, climate fiction, and transcultural Holocaust memory. His current work examines ecological mourning as a creative and transformative process. More info: www.stefcraps.com.