Researchers across a wide range of fields are devoting increasing attention to the psychological impact of climate change. This article focuses on literary fiction that foregrounds these psychological ramifications; fiction, in other words, that portrays characters experiencing what has been variously called “eco-” or “climate anxiety”. I argue that the short story form and brevity on a stylistic level can pursue cognitive realism by evoking the sense of fragmented attention and futurelessness that defines the psychology of anxiety. In many instances, that representation of climate anxiety is supported and amplified by literature’s engagement with news and social media that are associated with a breakdown of attentional focus. To explore those links, I draw on work on the phenomenology of anxiety and discuss examples from contemporary US literature, and more specifically from Lauren Groff’s short stories and Jenny Offill’s novel Weather. I show how these works capture the connection between awareness of climate change and the protagonists’ unique mind style, and how cognitive realism is often accompanied by dialogue with the forms of digital communication.
Marco Caracciolo (Thu,) studied this question.