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Solar as Narrative Element: The Interrupting Surface

Chapter of: Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions(pp. 159–168)

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Metadata
TitleSolar as Narrative Element
SubtitleThe Interrupting Surface
ContributorRhys Williams(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0404.1.14
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/solarities-elemental-encounters-and-refractions/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightRhys Williams
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2023-11-22
Long abstractA poetics of weightlessness and light, of being sheer surface without depth or footprint, has come to dominate popular, corporate, and activist representations of solar technologies. This chapter claims that this widespread uptake is due to solar’s narrative and aesthetic affordance as an interrupting surface, acting to break the purchase of history upon the present, and excusing imaginaries of the future from the need to engage with the past. This claim will be explored through three examples in the final season of Detectorists, a quirky British comedy whose homely realism casts solar’s usual future-oriented aesthetics into relief.
Page rangepp. 159–168
Print length10 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • aesthetics
  • narrative
  • surface
  • history
  • genre
  • solar
Contributors

Rhys Williams

(author)
senior lecturer in Energy & Environmental Humanities at University of Glasgow
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0129-7710

Rhys Williams is a senior lecturer in Energy & Environmental Humanities at the University of Glasgow. His research focusses on the politics and poetics of infrastructure, energy and food futures. He’s recently published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Open Library of Humanities, and the New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction.