기후 위기 시대의 문학적 대응의 의의와 한계: 문어의 아홉 번째 다리 를 중심으로

초록

This article analyzes Dirk Rossmann’s novel The Ninth Arm of the Octopus from the perspective of Anthropocene literature, examining how popular narrative strategies and thriller aesthetics reconfigure climate-crisis discourse through literary means. The work integrates real-world politics and geopolitical information with meticulous realist detail and minute-by-minute tension to construct the genre’s characteristic suspense curve. It also presents a narrative mechanism that simultaneously activates readers’ cognition, affect, and normative awareness through the ethical utterances of a future descendant narrator, thereby prompting action. The article interprets the text through the conceptual framework of “Ustopia”, which traverses the utopia-dystopia binary and reveals devices of practical imagination that demand precise crisis diagnosis and immediate action. It further identifies the limitations of the G3 Alliance’s state-led coercive measures and their political imagination of global cooperation, noting that these fail to adequately address debates on ecological dictatorship, the gap between fiction and real-world politics, and issues of capital, corporations, and structural systems. Transcending these limitations, this study reconstructs the work’s core message by foregrounding a direction of value transformation beyond growth-oriented capitalism, demonstrating that popular literature possesses the potential for interdisciplinary mediation at the intersection of data, policy, and ethics. In particular, it argues that this text can function as a form of practical literature that connects readers’ imagination, reflection, and action. In conclusion, this study articulates the future task of Anthropocene literature―emerging from the genre experimentation, political imagination, and accompanying ethical dilemmas raised by the novel―as achieving a balance between popular appeal and criticality, and between imagination and praxis. It contends that literature can become a social catalyst that recognizes institutions and sensibilities, moving beyond mere warning. Furthermore, The Ninth Arm of the Octopus activates the imagination for collective transformation by proposing a model of horizontal cooperation through the metaphor of the octopus rather than a conventional “hero”. It demonstrates that literature, rather than prophesying the future, re-illuminates the present, and that its point of departure lies where the reader’s imagination is organized into action.

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