Abstract This essay takes up the question of how literature can help us adapt to a world in which climate change is an ongoing reality. Climate literature offers a promising realm in which scholars are reckoning with the central humanistic problem of how we make sense of a world undergoing the chaos of climate change. This essay explores the climate literature anthology Tales of Two Planets for how its stories and essays model a practice of narrative agency—the ability to consciously identify, dispense with, and create the tales we tell ourselves about climate change. The narrative agency that climate literature like Tales of Two Planets promotes has the potential to widen its readers’ locus of control in environments where there is very little to begin with.
Kevin Piper (Thu,) studied this question.