Leveraging NLP Tools to Uncover Metarepresentations in Climate Fiction

The paper explores the climate crisis discourse in literature with the focus on the genre of climate fiction. The material of the study is a famous Hurricane Katrina novel Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. The main aim of the research is to enhance access to textual data collection, mark up and tag cognitive structures in climate fiction texts. We draw on the cognitive semantic approach and computational linguistic techniques to demonstrate how mental conceptual images of hurricane associate in the text. The methods proposed are intended to define the dominant topics, visualize distribution patterns, and establish correlations between hurricane-centered semantic-epistemic categories. The dominant themes of the novel ‒ nature control and survival ‒ demonstrate how climate fiction engages with anthropogenic climate change, as well as highlight the ways in which climate fiction novels blur the boundaries between the present, past, and future.