“Risk and Fiction: Uncertainty and Speculation Across Media”
International Workshop
University of Bayreuth, December 9, 2016
Time: 2:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Place: K 5, GW 1
DFG project “Contemporary American Risk Fiction” | Prof. Dr. J. Cortiel, Prof. Dr. S.
Mayer; http://www.amerikanistik.uni-bayreuth.de/de/DFG_project/index.html
This workshop is part of a series of meetings on the aesthetics, poetics and ethics of risk
in American culture organized at the University of Bayreuth as part of the DFG-funded
research project on Contemporary American Risk Fiction ;
The second workshop in the series, “Risk and Fiction: Uncertainty and Speculation
Across Media” will explore how fictional risk narratives enable and favor particular
types of speculation and how thinking about uncertainty in terms of risk creates new
ways of narrating the world in the Anthropocene. The concept of risk as we understand
it is fundamentally a response to uncertainty and insecurity; it is defined by its
anticipatory character and its origin in human decision-making. Risk emerged as an
economic and sociopolitical force in the early modern era, primarily referring to the
calculation of profits and losses in trade enterprises. As such, it focuses on possible
future events and rests on the rationalist conviction that adverse consequences of an
enterprise, and thus of a decision taken, can be calculated, minimized, or even avoided.
Linked to the development of the modern sciences and, since the 17th century, to the
emergence of probability calculus and statistical thinking, the articulation of risk has
become an essential speculative practice of our time, shaping societies, economies, and
cultures, ultimately on a global scale.
Contemporary notions of risk as they are played out in fiction specifically engage with
the effects of human use of technology on the non-human environment. To explore the
interaction between technoscience and the environment, fiction mixes existing genre
traditions (such as science fiction, horror, and realist fiction) and modes (such as the
apocalyptic, the dystopian, the gothic and the fantastic). Moreover, transmediality plays
a central role in narrating risk in fiction, both as a means to reflect upon the mediality of
risk storytelling and to extend risk narratives across media (through adaptation and/or
transmedia storytelling).
This workshop brings together science fiction studies and ecocriticism to explore the
storytelling practices specific to fictional risk narratives. In so doing, the workshop
presentations will focus on two central categories of the project as a whole: the
aesthetics and poetics of risk in fiction across media. The aim of the workshop is to
identify patterns (narrative and otherwise) and to approach an overarching
methodology for defining risk in fiction as a transmedial mode of speculation.