Narrating Environmental Citizenship. Norwegian picturebooks and comics in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In my project, I examine how aspects of “environmental citizenship” are discussed in Norwegian picturebooks and comics. The term “environmental citizenship” encompasses several concepts that originate from political sciences and discuss what it can mean to be a responsible, or “good”, citizen with regard to the environment. The concepts are characterised by various understandings of what citizenship means and which role the environment and its intrinsic value play. Common for the concepts is an argument for the need to change something in our behaviour towards the world we live in. An econarratological perspective: I examine seven multimodal texts in my dissertation, four picturebooks and three comics, published between 1974 and 2019. My theoretical approach is based on econarratology, a direction in literary studies that combines an ecocritical perspective with particular attention to narratological questions, or the texts’ narrative structures. How is the texts’ multimodal “storyworld” presented and which role does the environment play in it? How are aspects of environmental citizenship discussed through verbal text and pictures? And how do the texts address readers to convey perspectives on the environment? These are some of the questions I discuss in the analytical chapters of my dissertation. Main findings: It shows itself that multimodal texts for young readers present various understandings of what it means to be an environmentally aware citizen. The texts foreground different aspects as important when it comes to our relationship with the environment and how we can live more environmentally friendly. The variety in the narratives underlines that a more nuanced examination of picturebooks and comics is both fruitful and necessary in order to take the complexity of children’s literature seriously when it comes to environmental questions.