Exploring ‘Solastalgia’ and ‘Speciestalgia’ in Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

Abstract

This study argues that the impact of anthropogenic climate change goes beyond the materialistic damages manifested on the political and economic levels. Climate fiction or ‘cli-fi’ reconfigures speculative, critical and innovative perception of the challenges of climate change. I use Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior (2012) as a case study. As an overtly climate narrative, Flight Behavior dramatizes and humanizes the effect of climate change on personal experience and private lives. Ecological hazards strike homeland and are manifested in non-human species yet the effect expands influencing people’s outlook, perception and decisions and changing their lives in multiple ways, both in favorable and adverse directions. The theoretical framework of this study is grounded in the notions and concepts of ‘climate fiction or cli-fi,’ ‘solastalgia,’ ‘speciestalgia’ and formulated by the theorists Dan Bloom and Glenn Albrecht in this respect. Their presumptions and postulations highlight the psychological aspect and emotional dimensions of climatic cataclysm.