Situating Solastalgia within Climate Fiction: Anthropogenic Expansions of Dystopian Fiction

• Julia E. KIERNAN ^[1]
  1. [1] Lawrence Technological University

     Lawrence Technological University

     City of Southfield, Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Hélice, ISSN-e 1887-2905, Vol. 8, Nº. 2, 2022-2023, págs. 66-76
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • Climate fiction is a relatively new sub-genre of science fiction, gaining notoriety in the last decade. Throughout cli-fi familiar landscapes are framed by solastalgia—a relatively new term that describes mental distress triggered by environmental change—emphasizing to readers the catastrophic environmental effects of contemporary, ‘right now’ human choices.

    Using solastalgia as a framing device, this chapter offers an ecocritical analysis of Joyce Carol Oates “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019) which contemporizes the environmental sins of man within a landscape that is eerily familiar, but clearly apocalyptic. In emphasizing the ways that environmental landscapes are shaped by human choices, this article offers a holistic approach to reading solastalgia; a reading not grounded in solely in Western, monological, and colonial constructs of science, but extending into the axiological inclinations of the humanities that contextualize human relationships with surrounding landscapes as dialogic and constructivist. Situating solastalgia at the core of the cli-fi genre, this chapter will offer a reading of “Sinners” that examines the many interconnected dimensions of natureculture, emphasizing the competing forces of the human condition at play across dystopic, climate fiction