Daily life and global crisis : Human experience and narrative fiction in the age of the Anthropocene
: Lehtimäki Markku
: Duffy Helena, Leppänen Katarina
: New York, NY
: 2024
: Storying the Ecocatastrophe : Contemporary Narratives about the Environmental Collapse
: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment
: 25
: 44
: 290
: 978-1-032-72694-6
: 978-1-032-72695-3
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032726953-2
: 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.