Еколошка питања као метафора и стварност: феномен нестанка пчела у романима Маје Лунде и Теџуа Кола
Environmental Issues as Metaphor and reality: The Colony Collapse Disorder in the Novels by Maja Lunde and Teju Cole

Summary/Abstract: The paper undertakes to examine the literary representations of environmen-tal issues in works of contemporary realist fiction. The focus is on two 21st-century novels, Maja Lunde’s History of Bees (2015) and teju Cole’s Open City (2011), which both address ecological issues and in particular the problem of colony collapse dis-order (CCD). Although different in their narrative approaches, both novelists here demonstrate an acute awareness of the threat the disappearance of honeybees as a species would cause to human communities and life on earth in general. While Maja Lunde’s novel has been an obvious choice for this kind of analysis, the dis-appearance of bees being the novel’s central topic, teju Cole’s Open City has been selected as perhaps an even more realistic representation of the average person’s (or average New Yorker’s) stance towards such environmental issues, placing them in the midst of other primarily human-related concerns such as migrations or post-colonialism.regardless of the amount of text dedicated to bees and the CCD-syndrome, both Lunde and Cole point to the intricate connections between humans and non-human environment. Thus the novels can be taken as vivid illustrations of the the-ses proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and es-pecially by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern, whose primary concern is acknowledging importance of a non-anthropocentric approach. Latour’s theory of the natureculture hybrids, further developed by posthumanist theorists such as Donna Haraway, draws attention to the networks that constitute the environment.one of the concerns of the paper has been to highlight the way critical studies tend to approach environmentally-oriented works, especially those with no overt ecological agendas, such as Cole’s Open City. The tendency to interpret the represen-tations of nonhuman environment as metaphors for specifically human relations can work both in favor of and against raising environmental consciousness. What is needed in any case is to recognize the literal meaning of the text and the author’s genuine intention to address environmental issues as problems surpassing the hu-man domain.

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