A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
Daily life and global crisis : Human experience and narrative fiction in the age of the Anthropocene
Authors: Lehtimäki Markku
Editors: Duffy Helena, Leppänen Katarina
Publishing place: New York, NY
Publication year: 2024
Book title : Storying the Ecocatastrophe : Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse
Series title: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
First page : 25
Last page: 44
Number of pages: 290
ISBN: 978-1-032-72694-6
eISBN: 978-1-032-72695-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032726953-2
Web address : https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781032726953-2/daily-life-global-crisis-markku-lehtim%C3%A4ki
Markku Lehtimäki’s chapter suggests that popular climate change novels such as Ian McEwan’s Solar (2010) and Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) are largely anthropomorphic narratives which deal with human concerns in the changing global environment. Especially interesting are the different ways in which Solar and Weather narrativise the experience of climate change. McEwan does this mainly through conventional character- and plot-centred narrativity, while Offill employs a collage-like fragmented narration. In the chapter, storyfication is problematised in the context of the environmental crisis because narrative is linked to human experientiality and fails to represent broad timescales and non-human agencies. Both Solar and Weather suggest that global climate change is something too large-scale, too complex, and too abstract to be grasped by individual human beings. It is therefore mainly through fictional narratives that climate change can be felt both ethically and emotionally.