Re-storying the city: applying urban perspectives to eco-storytelling

气候变化可能感觉太大而无法解决，因为当日常生活和语言中几乎没有提到自然的时候，生态危害是“难以看到和理解的”(Perkins and Thorns 2012，Macfarlane 2015)。本论文旨在通过口头讲故事作为一种文学表现形式来重新激发人们对山水的欣赏。它建立在现有研究的基础上，这些研究将这种做法定义为“生态讲故事”(例如，Coleman 2013，Nanson 2014)；但通过一种新的理论方法，它确定了他们模型中的局限性，并探索了更广泛的视角的潜在好处。生态讲故事研究通过促进农村地区和前工业时代的民间故事，阐明了城市社会或语言使用所失去的环境视角。然而，亚文化研究和口述历史理论的结合表明，人们不仅在过去创造了民俗，他们在现代生活中也在继续创造，因为故事的直觉创造是人类对存在的反应(Eliade 1964；Penef 1990；Macintyre[1981]2007)。推而广之，城市传说和当代记忆应该包含也表达一个地方精神的叙事，在重新让人们与风景接触方面，可能与更古老的文学一样有价值。在生态故事讲述中省略这些可能会忽视现代生活，从而减少一个人对现代生活的积极参与。因此，本文将研究城市民俗和生活故事，并在此基础上创作生态讲故事表演，在布莱顿和霍夫的市区/郊区上演。观众将接受采访，以评估他们的环境意识受到的影响，但也将被邀请为正在进行的研究贡献自己的故事。收集的故事将在城市的在线互动地图中展示，作为学习资源公开提供：这大大扩大了受众和影响范围。

Climate change can feel too big to resolve, because ecological harm is 'difficult to see and comprehend' when everyday life and language contain little reference to nature (Perkins and Thorns 2012, Macfarlane 2015). This thesis aims to reinspire appreciation of the landscape through oral storytelling as a form of literary expression. It builds on existing studies, which define this practice as 'eco-storytelling' (eg Coleman 2013, Nanson 2014); but through a fresh theoretical approach, it identifies limitations in their model, and explores the potential benefits of a wider perspective. Eco-storytelling studies illuminate an environmental perspective lost to urban society or language use, by promoting folktales from rural areas and the pre-industrial past. However, a combination of subcultural study and oral history theory illustrates that people did not only create folklore in the past; they continue to do so in modern life, as the intuitive creation of stories is a human reaction to existence (Eliade 1964; Peneff 1990; Macintyre [1981] 2007). By extension, urban legend and contemporary memory should contain narratives that also express the spirit of a place, and might be equally as valuable as older literature in re-engaging people with the landscape. Omitting these from eco-storytelling runs the risk of ignoring modern life, and therefore diminishing one's proactive engagement with it. This thesis will therefore research urban folklore and life stories, from which eco-storytelling performances will be created, to be staged in the urban/suburban area of Brighton & Hove. Audiences will be interviewed to evaluate impact on their environmental awareness, but will also be invited to contribute their own stories to ongoing research. Collected stories will be presented in an online interactive map of the city, publicly available as a learning resource: this significantly widens the audience and scope for impact.