Storm, Stress, and Solastalgia: Climate Change in the Undergraduate Literature Classroom

Abstract

Climate change has become a major force in shaping human experience. Climate change affects not only the Earth's atmosphere, biospheres, glaciers, and oceans; it also affects our perception of humanity's role in the natural world. While the majority of the grand narratives on climate change is in the hands of scientists, the literary humanities have an important role to play in creating a forum in the English literature classroom for students to read fiction that stimulates critical thinking about climate change, its contexts and history, and the future. This paper examines literary trends that creatively explore and cope with the effects of climate change on society. While several literary genres directly address climate change, this paper will contextualize two examples of climate science fiction - Paulo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower – with William Shakespeare's King Lear, Charlotte Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Mary Shelley's The Last Man. These works address solastalgia, a neologism that describes profound sadness and frustration about irreversible changes to one's home environment and the feeling of powerlessness. Similar to the influential Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) movement in Romantic literature, today's environmental distress and human worries are reflected in genres like science fiction. Climate change fiction enables readers to process alarmist contemporary environmental issues by contextualizing the anxiety-inducing data generated by scientific research with the power of the human imagination and the emotional intelligence of reading fiction.