String Figures of Response-ability and the Refusal to Respond in Clare Pollard’s The Weather

Cornelia Wächter

doi:10.1515/jcde-2021-0004

Article

String Figures of Response-ability and the Refusal to Respond in Clare Pollard’s The Weather

is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The “Warder” in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015), co-editor of Middlebrow and Gender: 1890–1945 (2016), and Complicity and the Politics of Representation (2019). She is currently working on a book project on complicity, queer theory, and queer British fiction, as well as co-editing two collections of essays entitled Heritage, Space and Well-Being and The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations.

Published/Copyright: May 19, 2021

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 9 Issue 1

Abstract

This article discusses Clare Pollard’s The Weather (Royal Court, 2004) with a focus on how the play critiques the widespread failure to assume responsibility for both personal and collective wrongdoing as symptomatic of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. More specifically, the paper reads Pollard’s play through the prism of Donna Haraway’s conception of science fiction as a figure, denoting “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far” (2) in order to demonstrate that it does contain a utopian kernel in its uncovering of the (affective) strings that bind individuals to the logic of the society of consumers (Bauman) and in its final appeal to cut those strings, even though the play does not actually transcend the capitalist imaginary.

Keywords: Clare Pollard; The Weather; dystopia; Anthropocene; Capitalocene; response-ability; political theatre; Donna Haraway; string figures; Zygmunt Bauman

About the author

Cornelia Wächter

is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Paderborn. She is the author of Place-ing the Prison Officer: The “Warder” in the British Literary and Cultural Imagination (2015), co-editor of Middlebrow and Gender: 1890–1945 (2016), and Complicity and the Politics of Representation (2019). She is currently working on a book project on complicity, queer theory, and queer British fiction, as well as co-editing two collections of essays entitled Heritage, Space and Well-Being and The Cultural Heritage of Psychiatry and Its Literary Transformations.

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Published Online: 2021-05-19

Published in Print: 2021-05-06

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2021-0004

Keywords for this article

Clare Pollard; The Weather; dystopia; Anthropocene; Capitalocene; response-ability; political theatre; Donna Haraway; string figures; Zygmunt Bauman