“Art in crisis” : The novel in the age of digital media and global change

: Lehtimäki, Markku

: Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia; Kuznetski, Julia; Battisti, Chiara

Publisher: Taylor and Francis

: 2025

: The Routledge Companion to Literatures and Crisis

: 367

: 375

: 978-1-03-242464-4

: 978-1-00-336288-3

DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003362883-43

: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003362883-43

This chapter discusses the contemporary situation in which large-scale environmental phenomena, such as climate change, may also induce a crisis in the literary imagination. The chapter focuses on Jenny Offill’s novel Weather (2020) as an example of a contemporary novel that raises theoretical reflections on environmental imagination and about the limits of the realist novel in the age of digital and social media. In Weather, the character narrator confronts the necessity of reconciling the everyday aspects of life with the apocalyptic dimensions of global crisis. The novel reveals how, in the age of the Anthropocene, humans simultaneously inhabit multiple levels of experience, from the most mundane daily routines to the looming spectre of a planet in peril.