Elise Kraatila

My current research project aims to conceptualize, map and analyze speculative narratives as epistemic devices for consolidating, communicating and legitimizing hypothetical knowledge. Such narratives, characterized by scenario-building and “what if?” propositions, proliferate in both 21st-century fiction (dystopias, science fiction) and nonfiction (science communication, journalism). Speculation is used across the field of 21st-century storytelling as a mode for making legible uncertain or unknowable events and phenomena: things that cannot be represented directly or known for certain. Therefore, I suggest, speculative narratives can serve as epistemic devices for confronting the atmosphere of uncertainty that pervades 21st-century life. This atmosphere is characterized by (1) the polarized and fragmented sense of reality that has evoked the moniker “post-truth era”, as well as (2) worries and insecurities about the future brought about by climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and other geopolitical crises, encapsulated by the recent buzzword “permacrisis.” I hypothesize that the proliferation of speculative narratives across 21st-century fiction and news media can be fruitfully examined as a response to this uncertainty. Such narratives may seek to provide means for coping with the uncertainty, to alleviate fears or to consolidate actionable knowledge – but they can also merely appeal to existing anxieties and insecurities of the audience. I recently completed a post-doctoral project (funded by Ella and Georg Ehrnrooth foundation) concerning speculative representation of global-scale phenomena in 21st-century Finnish and Anglo-American Fiction. I earned my PhD at Tampere University in December 2021, with a doctoral thesis titled The Crisis of Representation and Speculative Mimesis: Rethinking Relations between Fiction and Reality with 21st-century Fantasy Storytelling. The thesis concerns literary speculation as a particular kind of artistic response to reality, and the potential such response has to confront our increasingly fragmented sense of reality that has prompted widespread discussion of an alleged post-truth era in recent years.