ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the narratives partly comprising global warming as a research area calling for cultural studies. It presents ‘Cultural Hermeneutics’ in order to name the territory for interpretation that has appeared between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s ‘universal hermeneutics’ and the ‘textual hermeneutics’ that Paul Ricoeur–despite his remarks above–primarily unfolds. With these remarks a cultural hermeneutical foundation has been given for the interpretation of the different forms of preunderstandings and world depictions that manifest in Western climate fiction. The chapter shows how certain imagination forms reappear in Western climate fiction. Indeed, the description of climate models as ‘heuristic fictions for redescribing reality’ is consistent with Latour’s description of global warming as a quasi-object that besides being real and social, is also narratively constructed. Anthropogenic global warming can be characterized as an event prompting such a shift. The interpretations engendered by global warming also create new forms of affective receptivity.
