The aim of my thesis is to analyse the various ways in which different literary cultures react to the threat of climate change. Because the scope and structure of this project allows me to, I will be dissecting three separate novels: Weather by Jenny Offill, which brings the US perspective on board; Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney, novel that will serve as the Irish/European point of view and Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, novel that will be useful in order to explore the racial biases that exist in the conversations that surround the climate disaster as well as including a non-western look into the matter. If these three different books represent different responses to global warming and its effects, what are those responses? Do these varying stances reflect the main characters’ nationality, race or country of residence’s policies?
In an introduction where I offer insight as to where society stands in the issue of climate change, explaining what it means to be living in the Anthropocene era (with the help of Daha’s article on “Natural Sustainability: A Comparative Study of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, We, The Survivors, Gun Island and Weather”) I will also briefly situate the reader in the context of the three novels: where they come from, where they intend to go.
When it comes to Weather, I will be focusing on its negative, fatalist and despairing reaction, discussing its depiction of Pre Traumatic Stress Disorder and examining how that plays a part in the curious form utilised by the author. For me to do all this, I will begin by engaging with different trauma studies work that inspect not only the relationship between traumatic experiences and experimentation and literature, but also the concept of Pre-TSD and climate change as a trigger of such a phenomenon. These works include Trauma by Lucy Bond and Stef Craps, which provides an overview of the history of the word trauma, revisits literary trauma theory and offers critiques on different trauma theories and will serve as the main bones for my theoretical framework; Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedia Form—where Paul Saint-Amour explores the rippling effects of anticipating anxiety in the human psyche—and E. Ann Kaplan’s Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction will serve the pillars of the main part of this chapter. I will be using this beforementioned work to argue how climate change arises that negative reaction from Weather’s main character Lizzie. When it comes to the form of the novel and its relationship to trauma, I will be leading that discussion with Alan Gibb’s Contemporary American Trauma Narratives in mind, but will be utilising other comparative texts. These will include Offill’s other novel, Dept. Of Speculation, and Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Keeman, which acts as an exploration of environmental disaster in quite the contemporary American setting of Hollywood, a stark contrast from the deeply domestic one found in Weather. This chapter has a main question: since Offill is representing the darkest psychological response possible to the threat of climate change, how does she represent those feelings on page?
Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney takes a completely different stance to environmental decline, and so will this chapter. Since Rooney’s books are so heavily political, this part of my thesis project will tackle ecofeminism as its main theoretical framework: the mistreatment of the natural world and the mistreatment of the female body are closely linked together, and in such a female-focused novel (and, in general, author) one cannot be discussed without the other. However, I will also be exploring the concept of ‘Solastalgia’, coined by Glenn Albrecht in his 2005 essay Solastalgia: a new concept in human health and identity, and how prevalent it actually is during the close, personal and intimate interaction between the two main characters as they are discussing their lives going forward in a world that is getting hotter by the minute. Since humanity and hope are a big aspect of the novel, and it is a reiterated point at the end of the literary work itself, I will be using Victor Frankl’s Yes to Life In Spite of Everything to explore those points of view. As a holocaust survivor, his work is valuable insight as to how to positively act in times of despair and anguish. Since Beautiful World Where Are You is a fairly recent book—and the most recent out of her overall published works—, and most of the secondary sources for it are made up of reviews and interviews I will be taking a similar approach as I did with Weather, and will be comparing Rooney’s latest novel with her previous books, looking for answers as to why the shift in tonality (from hopelessness to hopefulness), and if the rapidly worsening environmental situation had an influence in it and her main characters’ decisions to not let climate pressure tear them down.
For the third and last chapter of my thesis, biases of race must be left behind when handling Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, and thus anticolonial theories of ecocriticism must be applied to the study of the novel as well. The aforementioned article by Zeenat Abdul Haq Daha on “Natural Sustainability” serves as one of the main texts for this last section, as it is a comparative study of Ghosh’s novel and Offill’s own Weather. Engaged in postcolonial concerns like Amitav Ghosh himself, Ursula Kluwick’s article “The global deluge: floods, diluvian imagery, and aquatic language in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Gun Island” presents itself as a useful academic text that explores the novels climate message. And despite the fact that Gun Island has been previously compared to Weather (and they are being presently discussed in the same paper) I thought it fitting to bring Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness into the conversation, what with it being another magical realism tale from a non-white author that also deals with issues of climate change.