Climate Fiction, Climate Theory: Decolonising Imaginations of Global Futures

The international politics of climate change invokes the imagination of various potential global futures, ranging from techno-optimist visions of ecological modernisation to apocalyptic nightmares of climate chaos. This article argues that most dominant framings of the future in climate policy imaginaries tend to be depoliticised and linear visions of universal, homogenous time, with little spatio-temporal or ecological plurality. This article aims to convince IR scholars of climate politics that Africanfuturist climate fiction novels can contribute to the decolonisation of climate politics through radically different socio-climatic imaginaries to those that dominate mainstream imaginations of climate futures. The Africanfuturist climate fiction novels of authors such as Nnedi Okorafor, Lauren Beukes and Doris Lessing imagine different spaces, temporalities, ecologies and politics. Reading them as climate theory, they offer the possibility of a more decolonised climate politics, in which issues of land and climate justice, loss and damage, extractive political economies and the racialised and gendered violence of capitalism are central.

The Autofictional in Serial, Literary Works

This chapter approaches serial literary autofictions as a distinct variant of autofictional writing. While discussions of life writing often focus on male authors, the chapter redresses this imbalance by considering women writers, specifically the works of Dorothy Richardson, Doris Lessing, and Rachel Cusk. The approach is new in exploring the autofictional in serial, literary works, and tracing connections across an author’s oeuvre. Such a focus leads to an extended understanding of autofiction and the autofictional as challenging autobiographical unity and coherence. The chapter distinguishes between different forms of seriality (including series, serial, and serialized life narratives), and argues that serial publications and structures enhance literary and autofictional tendencies in that they draw attention to the complexities of autobiographical representation.

Memory, Affectivity and Intimacy in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and Rosa Montero's La carne

This article discusses the literary approaches used by Doris Lessing in Love, Again (1995), and Rosa Montero in her novel La Carne (2016), emphasising the parallels between these writers' interest in women’s ageing experiences and the role that both of these novels’ main characters play in the contemporary cultural scene. Of particular interest in this article is the experience of these female authors who write these novels between the 1990s and the two first decades of the 21st century, historical periods which were marked by major social and economic upheaval, I suggest that their respective productions problematise the notions of memory, affectivity and intimacy, and notably showcase the contributions made by women in the process of ageing as creative agents of social and cultural changes in contemporary Europe.

The Plight of the Female Protagonist Depicted in Doris Lessing’s The Grass Is Singing

The Woman is a God-given boon to mankind. She is the most lively and endearing personality on the earth because of her never-ending compassion and her care for fellow human beings. She is such a protective shield for humanity that tolerates everything with a smile. But ironically this male-dominated society has been harming, crushing, and suppressing its armor for centuries. The status of a woman in our society is still debatable. A woman sacrifices her desires, aspirations, and ambitions at every phase of her life sometimes by being a daughter, a wife, a sister, or a mother. From time to time woman finds herself in such an odd and precarious situation that later causes her plight. The present paper attempts to explain the plight of the female protagonist, Mary Turner in the novel The Grass Is Singing written by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing.

Virginia Woolf in the Canon of Women’s Literature Narrative Futures of The Feminist Novel

Virginia Woolf’s novels have historically been regarded as exceptional for their nuanced characterization, particularly of women, and as foundationally influential to women writers after 1945. This chapter investigates the feminist underpinnings of Woolf’s portrayals of female characters in order to trace Woolf’s ongoing legacy in the feminist writing of today’s women authors. Focusing on three archetypes—the Angel, the Artist, and the Girl—the chapter evaluates Woolf’s techniques for female characterization alongside those deployed by women writers including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Claire Messud, Fatima Mernissi, and Jenni Fagan. These comparative readings show the ways in which Woolf’s fiction inspires contemporary women writers to explore relationships between women and gives them a map for creating complex narratives of affiliation to encompass women’s physical, emotional, and intellectual lives.

THE CHARACTERISTICS AND APPROACHES OF IMMANENCE CRITICISM IN DORIS LESSING’S NOVEL OF “THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK”

Unlike the XIX century, literary culture of the XX century made a strong aesthetic leap in women’s identity. This process has caused to the emergence of a large number of new generation women writers in world literature and moreover, these writers had succeeded in revealing a real and contemporary literary phenomenon, such as “immanence- immanentism” which is focused on female landscapes in their stories and novels. In general, the works of “immanence” authors have a feminist background. As a doctrine, imamnence is used to explain the connection with the spiritual world, which is confirmed by some philosophical and metaphysical theories and critics. But later, immanence was replaced by Kant as a philosophical concept, and this awareness began to include a philosophical disposition perceived by the senses on the basis of personal experience. Lessing, who donated many works to world culture, created a portrait of the physical and spiritual characteristics of people (especially women) with her strong logic and talent in all her stories and novels and tried to explain in detail the special feelings that exist in them. With the help of this concept, Lessing aimed not only to represent the love experiences and emotional vibrations of women in her novels, but also to present a strong and courageous woman in a socio-cultural and political context, unlike female literature. In this paper is discussed, the feature elements of immanent culture in Doris Lessing’s novel in (“The Golden Notebook”). In the novel, Lessing interprets the classic drama of a woman of art who is free ones like as herself and in their examples, examines the potential and profiles of creative women seeking their place in social society. In her works, Doris Lessing reproduces the female perspective in the universe by thinking from the prism of immanentism and pays particular attention to the psychology of female characters and the identification of their inner states of heroes. Based on all of these, the author also refers to the expanding principle of women sovereignty regarding the rights and the status of women in society. At the same time, Lessing also explores the possibility of a relationship based on the concept of mundane reality as an alternative to romantic love parodies of postmodernism, and with this in mind, she erects a “protective wall” against the expansion of the “Western world” in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Key words: existence, immanence, Sufism, "The Golden Notebook", socio-cultural

Woman as the Other—Interpretations of the Gender Wars in “A Woman on a Roof” from the Perspective of Existential Feminism

Doris Lessing is one of the Nobel Prize winners and “A Woman on a Roof” is such a famous short story of hers. In the patriarchal society, women are in the lower status, but the woman in the story struggles bravely to fight against the male power. During her fighting, the woman has doubts and hesitation, but she finally forces the three males to put off their prejudice. This paper focuses on how the woman strives for her own rights, and talks from the perspective of Existential Feminism, taking the main male and female characters in “A Woman on a Roof” as examples, so as to explore women’s self-survival in the dualistic society. Through studying her feminist thinking in the short story, the paper points out that the woman finally transforms her role from the Other to the Subject and then she is in an equal position with the three males. Though the two genders does not reconcile with each other as it seems to be with the purification of rainwater in “A Woman on a Roof”, the woman has made a big progress in the pursuit of her own transcendence.