Parts Per Million and An Accompanying Exegesis
Files
(Library staff access only)
(Library staff access only)
Date
2022
Authors
Roder, Michael Hugh
Editors
Advisors
Prosser, Rosslyn
Jones, Jill
Jones, Jill
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Type:
Thesis
Citation
Statement of Responsibility
Conference Name
Abstract
This thesis consists of a creative work in the form of a novel titled Parts Per Million and an accompanying exegesis.
Parts Per Million is set in Adelaide, Australia, beginning in 2015. Carlo is an insomniac in his early twenties, a former star youth cricketer whose potential career was derailed after a degenerative knee injury. Carlo accepts a menial labour position at the Museum of Climate Criminals, a project started by his childhood best friend and housemate Spencer. The museum is an Anarchist art activist project aimed at highlighting the capitalistic roots of climate change and putting a human face on the crisis. The museum becomes a media sensation, steadily becoming more popular, peaking with a tour across America in the waning days of the 2016 election.
After the unlikely election of Donald Trump, Carlo and his politically minded friends lapse into a depressive spiral. The form of the novel begins to unravel with Carlo’s deteriorating mental state, coming to a head with the disastrous bushfire season of 2019/2020. Here, the protagonists must face a world where the effects of climate change are no longer a horrifying prospect of the future but an immediate threat.
The exegesis of this work comes in three chapters. The first chapter, ‘An Accompanying Exegesis,’ considers the novel as a work of climate fiction, a genre of fiction dedicated to analysing and responding to the threat of climate change. This chapter considers the use of metafiction and setting in the novel as engaging with tropes of climate fiction while comparing it to other works in the emerging genre. This chapter also considers the novel’s anti-capitalist perspective and engages with concepts of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. Finally, this chapter considers the efficacy of climate fiction and activist art as a whole, both within the metafictional narrative of the novel and in the real world. The second chapter of this exegesis is entitled ‘A Case for the Video Essay.’ This chapter contextualises the genre of the video essay, which the third chapter of this exegesis exists in. This chapter discusses the difficulty scholars have had in defining this genre, from its roots in the experimental form of the film essay to the newly popular model of video essay that has emerged on YouTube, which closer represents the vlog. This chapter explains why I chose to present part of my exegesis as a video essay while contextualising the video within the anti-capitalist YouTube subgenre of ‘LeftTube’.
The third chapter is a video essay entitled ‘The Political History of Climate Change in Australia,’ which was originally published on YouTube in April 2020. This video essay analyses and recounts the history of how Commonwealth Governments have responded to the threat of climate change and argues that each government has prioritised the economic interests of the wealthy rather than crafting an effective climate change response. The video positions Australia as a globally irresponsible actor, even in the larger context of other wealthy nations.
School/Discipline
School of Creative Writing
Dissertation Note
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Creative Writing, 2022
Provenance
This thesis is currently under embargo and not available.