Vortrag: "A Place above Time" 3rd annual ACGS Conference, Amsterdam (Solvejg Nitzke)
A Place above Time – Mountaineering Narratives as Climatological Tales
The question of why one would risk one’s life to summit a mountain is as old as the apparent desire to do so and has been discussed at length and dismissed many times. But when it comes to climbing summits far above an environment that could sustain life and especially when summiting mountains whose peaks provide climates hostile to any living thing or being, those who live to tell the tale have reached a climax within their biography. In fact, as I will argue, this is one of the few ways to turn the confrontation of life-time and geological deep-time into a biographical experience. By comparing fictional and non-fictional accounts of such summits (Christoph Ransmayr’s Der fliegende Berg, Thomas Glavinic’s Das größere Wunder, Reinhold Messners Der nackte Berg and Jon Krakauers Into Thin Air) this paper aims to show that the rhetorical strategies of representing a summit cause the (auto-)biographical narrative to transform into a climatological tale. That is, the confrontation of personal, global, and geological temporality is a central motor for the narrative. By organizing stages of life analogous to the vertical climates/climate zones of the mountain reaching and surviving the death zone of the mountaintop both biography and climb are told as an adventure that covers the Earth in its entirety and transcends opposing temporalities. I will argue that tales of “High Places” (Cosgrove 2009) provide the poetological means to represent climates and, even more importantly, climate change in a way that provides a valuable alternative to the disaster-prone so-called Cli-Fi (Climate-Fiction). While being able to cover extremes, these tales are offering ways to connect the unimaginable scale of the world and its atmosphere to what is humanly possible.
http://acgs.uva.nl/content/events/conferences/2016/12/3rd-acgs-conference.html
Solvejg Nitzke · 15. Dezember 2016, 12:25 Uhr