Bernhard Forchtner

Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century.It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four distinct far-right cultural imaginaries – a ‘primordial’, a ‘nostalgic’, a ‘promethean’, and a ‘nihilist’ one – that each subtly conveys different yet linked ideas about space, time, ‘race’, gender, and heroic identity. By drawing attention to the cultural heterogeneity of the contemporary far right, Imagining Alternative Worlds offers key insights into the dreams, identities, and norms such actors hope will define our future.The book will be of interest to researchers of the far right, of literary, media and communication studies, and of social and cultural history.

Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century.It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four distinct far-right cultural imaginaries – a ‘primordial’, a ‘nostalgic’, a ‘promethean’, and a ‘nihilist’ one – that each subtly conveys different yet linked ideas about space, time, ‘race’, gender, and heroic identity. By drawing attention to the cultural heterogeneity of the contemporary far right, Imagining Alternative Worlds offers key insights into the dreams, identities, and norms such actors hope will define our future.The book will be of interest to researchers of the far right, of literary, media and communication studies, and of social and cultural history.

In Climate Obstruction: How Denial, Delay and Inaction are Heating the Planet, Kristoffer Ekberg, Bernhard Forchtner, Martin Hultman and Kirsti Jylhä bring together crucial insights from environmental history, sociology, media and communication studies and psychology to help us understand why we are failing to take necessary measures to avert the unfolding climate crisis.They do so by examining the variety of ways in which meaningful climate action has been obstructed. This ranges from denial of the scientific evidence for human-induced climate change and its policy consequences, to (seemingly sincere) acknowledgement of scientific evidence while nevertheless delaying meaningful climate action. The authors also consider all those actions by which often well-meaning individuals and collectives (unintendedly) hamper climate action. In doing so, this book maps out arguments and strategies that have been used to counter environmental protection and regulation since the 1960s by, first and foremost, corporations supported by conservative actors, but also far-right ones as well as ordinary citizens.This timely and accessible book provides tools and lessons to understand, identify and call out such arguments and strategies, and points to actions and systemic and cultural changes needed to avert or at least mitigate the climate crisis.

In Climate Obstruction: How Denial, Delay and Inaction are Heating the Planet, Kristoffer Ekberg, Bernhard Forchtner, Martin Hultman and Kirsti Jylhä bring together crucial insights from environmental history, sociology, media and communication studies and psychology to help us understand why we are failing to take necessary measures to avert the unfolding climate crisis.They do so by examining the variety of ways in which meaningful climate action has been obstructed. This ranges from denial of the scientific evidence for human-induced climate change and its policy consequences, to (seemingly sincere) acknowledgement of scientific evidence while nevertheless delaying meaningful climate action. The authors also consider all those actions by which often well-meaning individuals and collectives (unintendedly) hamper climate action. In doing so, this book maps out arguments and strategies that have been used to counter environmental protection and regulation since the 1960s by, first and foremost, corporations supported by conservative actors, but also far-right ones as well as ordinary citizens.This timely and accessible book provides tools and lessons to understand, identify and call out such arguments and strategies, and points to actions and systemic and cultural changes needed to avert or at least mitigate the climate crisis.

This book reconstructs how claims to know ‘the lessons’ from past wrongdoings are made useful in the present. These claims are powerful tools in contemporary debates over who we are, who we want to be and what we should do. Drawing on a wide range of spoken and written texts from Austria, Denmark, Germany and the United States, this book proposes an abstract framework through which such claims can be understood. It does so by conceptualising four rhetorics of learning and how each of them links memories of past wrongdoings to opposition to present and future wrongdoings. Drawing extensively on narrative theory, Lessons from the Past? reconstructs how links between past, present and future can be narrativised, thus helping to understand the subjectivities and feelings that these stories facilitate. The book closes by considering if and how such rhetorics might live up to their promise to know ‘the lessons’ and to enable learning, offering a revised theory of collective learning processes.