Abstract:Fiction writers who try to do justice to the vast temporal and spatial scales and the enormous complexity of climate change are faced with the problem that the phenomenon exceeds human perception and that it is not dramatic in the traditional sense. In this article we explore the formal challenges that arise when fiction takes on the temporality of climate change by examining three very different novels that seek to capture the geological timescale. We analyze Richard McGuire’s time-bending graphic novel Here (2014), Dale Pendell’s fictional future history The Great Bay (2010), and Jeanette Winterson’s cautionary science-fiction tale The Stone Gods (2007) through the lens of Barbara Adam’s concept of the timescape, Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence, and Timothy Clark’s notion of destructive doubles to see what kinds of literary innovations and translations the timescale of climate change has provoked. In doing so, we ponder Clark’s question, posed in his recent book Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), whether humans are constitutionally incapable of imagining the Anthropocene—the new geological epoch defined by the action of humans of which climate change is the most salient manifestation—or whether authors can adequately depict and convey it by disrupting conventional modes of representation. We conclude that while each of the three novels ultimately falls short in this regard, collectively they do chart possible pathways for successful literary treatment of the most pressing ecological threat of our time.

中文翻译：

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当代小说与想象气候变化时间尺度的挑战

摘要：小说作家们试图对气候变化的广阔时空尺度和巨大复杂性做出公正的评价，他们面临的问题是，这种现象超出了人类的感知范围，并没有传统意义上的戏剧性。在本文中，我们通过研究三本试图捕捉地质时间尺度的截然不同的小说，探讨了当小说呈现气候变化的时间性时出现的形式挑战。我们通过芭芭拉亚当的时间景观概念来分析理查德麦奎尔的时间弯曲图画小说在这里（2014）、戴尔彭德尔的虚构未来历史大湾（2010）和珍妮特温特森的警示科幻小说石神（2007） ，罗伯尼克松的缓慢暴力的想法，和蒂莫西·克拉克 (Timothy Clark) 的破坏性双重概念，看看气候变化的时间尺度引发了什么样的文学创新和翻译。在这样做的过程中，我们思考克拉克在他最近的著作《边缘生态批评：人类世作为阈值概念》（2015 年）中提出的问题，即人类是否在本质上无法想象人类世——由人类活动定义的新地质时代哪种气候变化是最突出的表现——或者作者是否可以通过打破传统的表现方式来充分描绘和传达它。我们得出的结论是，虽然三部小说最终都在这方面有所欠缺，但总的来说，它们确实为我们这个时代最紧迫的生态威胁的成功文学处理指明了可能的途径。