Weathered Minds: Climate Anxiety and Emotional Geographies in Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’ (2020)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/eduj.Vol62.Iss2.4802Keywords:
KEY WORDS: Anthropocene, climate anxiety, ecological crisis, emotional geography, solastalgia.Abstract
This article studies ‘Weather’ (2020) by Jenny Offill as an important work of current climate fiction that portrays the emotional and inner effects of climate anxiety. Unlike conventional climate fiction narratives of catastrophe and spectacle, ‘Weather’ depicts a soft climate aesthetic that highlights fragmented narrative, irony, and daily anxiety. Drawing on theories from ecopsychology, solastalgia, emotional geography, and affective theory, the study explores how Offill’s formally simple style echoes the confusion and unease of being in the Anthropocene. Through textual analysis, the study positions ‘Weather’ within broader ecological humanities debates, concentrating on how ambiance anxiety is internalized and moulded by cultural, social, and psychological burdens. Offill’s hero, Lizzie, represents the psychologically drained, ethically numbed matter of climate instability. By intermingling narrative form and affective analysis, this study illustrates how ‘Weather’ represents the restrained emotional geographies of ecological breakdown and exemplifies how literature can respond to environmental distress.
Downloads
References
References
Albrecht, G. (2005). Solastalgia: A new concept in health and identity. PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature, 3, 41–55.
Albrecht, G. (2019). Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press.
Buell, L. (2005). The future of environmental criticism: Environmental crisis and literary imagination. Blackwell Publishing.
Buell, L. (2009). Toxic discourse. In R. Kerridge & N. Sammells (Eds.), Writing the environment: Ecocriticism and literature (pp. 33–48). Zed Books.
Clayton, S., Manning, C., Speiser, M. and Hill, A.N., 2023. Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities, Responses. American Psychological Association.
DeLoughrey, E. (2019). Allegories of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.
Dürbeck, G. (2019). Narratives of ecological grief in the Anthropocene. In: T. Clark & T. S. Lynch (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities.
Gaard, G. (2011). Ecofeminism revisited: Rejecting essentialism and re-placing species in a material feminist environmentalism. Feminist Formations, 23(2), 26–53. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2011.0017
Ghosh, A. (2018). The great derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. Penguin UK.
Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of place and sense of planet: The environmental imagination of the global. Oxford University Press.
Houser, H. (2020). Infowhelm: Environmental art and literature in an age of data. Columbia University Press.
Jaquette Ray, S. (2020). A field guide to climate anxiety: How to keep your cool on a warming planet. University of California Press.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Offill, J. (2020). Weather. Alfred A. Knopf.
Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2018). The influence of climate fiction: An empirical survey of readers. Environmental Humanities, 10 (2), 473–500.
https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-7156848
Seymour, N. (2018). Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. University of Minnesota Press.
Trexler, A. (2015). Anthropocene fictions: The novel in a time of climate change. University of Virginia Press.
Von Mossner, A. W. (2017). Affective ecologies: Empathy, emotion, and environmental narrative. Ohio State University Press.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 أ.م.د. هاژە صالح حسن، م. جنار كمال طيب
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
