Can Reading Stories Save the Planet? Narrating the World (Out) of the Poly/Permacrisis

While the majority of contemporary buzzwords are rather specific in focus, the years 2022 and 2023 witnessed the viral rise of two words—“polycrisis” and “permacrisis”—aspiring to represent the post-millennial moment comprehensively, in both its many-sided apocalypticism and unsettling chronicity. The word “polycrisis” focuses on the plurality and interconnectedness of problems contemporary world is facing; “permacrisis,” on the other hand, expresses rather the emotional toll of continuous anxiety, and points to the destructive influence protracted crises have on people’s ability to navigate and make sense of (i.e. narrate) reality. Retrieving a once lost narrative frame is no easy task. The renarration of contemporaneity out of the “narrative collapse” (Rao 2020) occasioned by the current poly/permacrisis seems to require thus not only practical fixes, that is decisive implementation of reforms or the choice of new growth plans, but also narrative models for confronting and interpreting what the world has become, while envisaging possible futures.