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This paper investigates scale as a central dimension of literary modelling in a contemporary US-American novel on climate change: Jenny Offill’s 2020 Weather. I am interested in how literature models a world in which climate change is not a future event but a present reality for its readers and, as part of my inquiry, how interdisciplinary approaches to models and modelling can broaden our understanding of the kind of knowledges and, with that, the kinds of worlds that models produce. Offill’s novel initially appears more preoccupied with the everyday life of the liberal-democrat middle-class on the East coast in the times of the Trump presidency than with the climate crisis. Drawing on modelling theory by economic historian Mary S. Morgan and eco-narratologist Erin James, I want to suggest, however, that the novel provides the textual clues that allow its readers to model a specific form of reading practice, a specific mode of perceiving the world and as a result, to model a ‘storyworld’ in which climate change is a reality that is difficult to grasp and to accept.

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Cycles, Spirals, and the Challenge of Scale: Literary Modelling in Climate Fiction

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    2025年

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  • Stefanie Mueller

摘要

This paper investigates scale as a central dimension of literary modelling in a contemporary US-American novel on climate change: Jenny Offill’s 2020 Weather. I am interested in how literature models a world in which climate change is not a future event but a present reality for its readers and, as part of my inquiry, how interdisciplinary approaches to models and modelling can broaden our understanding of the kind of knowledges and, with that, the kinds of worlds that models produce. Offill’s novel initially appears more preoccupied with the everyday life of the liberal-democrat middle-class on the East coast in the times of the Trump presidency than with the climate crisis. Drawing on modelling theory by economic historian Mary S. Morgan and eco-narratologist Erin James, I want to suggest, however, that the novel provides the textual clues that allow its readers to model a specific form of reading practice, a specific mode of perceiving the world and as a result, to model a ‘storyworld’ in which climate change is a reality that is difficult to grasp and to accept.