On Climate Writing in The Water Knife

Abstract

  Contemporary American writer Paolo Bacigalupi bases his literary imagination on the real world. In The Water Knife, he makes the abstract and grandiose process of climate change tangible and palpable, and constructs a picture of the drought-ravaged American Midwest in the near-future, providing a rich narrative field for the discussion of global climate change. Through the representation and impact of climate issues presented in the novel, the paper analyzes the special manifestations and symbolic and metaphorical significance of climate writing from the historical dimension, ecological dimension and ethical dimension, with the hope of promoting people’s deeper understanding of and attention to climate change, integrating macro climate change with micro human survival experience and giving full play to the imaginative, cognitive, aesthetic, critical, educational and behavioral functions of climate change fiction, so as to enable people to better assume their responsibilities of environmental ethics, and provide useful reference for coping with climate variability and bridging ecological texture.