Towards a Sustainable Built Environment: Arcology in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife

Authors

HOUFKOVÁ Kateřina

Year of publication 2021
Type Appeared in Conference without Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Description The proposed paper seeks to discuss the arcology motif of Bacigalupi’s novel in the context of ecocriticism, focusing on the potential of climate fiction to contribute to the topic of Anthropocene. Bacigalupi’s fictional arcology will be compared with Soleri’s original term described in his book Arcology: The City in the Image of Man (1973). The aim of the paper is to analyze and describe Bacigalupi’s contribution to the hypothetical concept of arcology as well as to reveal the symbolic nature of this motif in the literary text. The arcologies in the novel, I suggest, do not only represent a solution and hope for future civilization; they are also the cause of elitism and stratification of the society.
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