1. Abarrio, Ruben Peinado “FRAGMENTED AND BEWILDERING: THE NEW RISK SOCIETY IN JENNY OFFILL’S WEATHER.”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26 pp. 1 – 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.11. Accessed November 28th, 2022.

Abarrio’s article argues that Offill creates a call to action through the fragmentation. “Weather” creates a critique against ‘posthumanism’ society. This idea can be connected towards both Fisher and Jarr’s articles where people’s actions are at the forefront of the criticism. Abarrio does something unique and mentions Offill dropping in the ‘obligatory of hope’ website as an advertisement to call people to participate in these ‘grassroot community projects’ and ‘global environmentalist movements’ in Abarrio’s words and I can use this as an excuse to extend my research onto the external source provided in the novel.

2. Fisher, Clare “The Centrality of the Trivial.”, University of Leeds. Published July 13th, 2020.

Fisher’s article focuses on the non-hierarchical aesthetic of the novel, allowing for all issues to be on ground level. The use of this article would be to also point out the similar non-hierarchical aesthetic that is the novel and connect it to the trivial nature of detailing and representation of Lizzie as a character where we don’t have much said about her, but we learn more about the characters around her, and her fear of disaster effects the people around her. This article can be connected to Jarr’s with the critique of environmental politics through Lizzie’s character.

3. Jarr, Sana’ Mahmoud “The Peril of Climate Change in Jenny Offill’s Weather.”, Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices, vol. 6 (2), pp. 45 – 50. Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices, https://doi.org/10.32996/jweep.2024.6.2.5. Published June 1st, 2024.

For Jarr’s article, I will be touching on Pages 47 & 48 where she breaks down aspects of literature and the environment within Weather. Speaking through an ecocritical lens where she mentions things such as Capitalism and Eco-Anxiety which can be easily tied back to the critical essays, we’ve read in class in regard to Offill and how she goes about critiquing environmental politics. The entire article (Pages 45 – 50) centers around Weather’s main “focus” of alerting readers to the risks of climate change from a social standpoint.

4. Kruger, Katherine “Aging through Precarious Time”, Poetics Today, vol. 44 (1-2), pp. 89 – 110. https://doi-org.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/10.1215/03335372-10342099.

Kruger’s article uses “Weather” to focus on the narrative of aging and precarious work. Kruger dedicates half of her article to “Weather” to how the act of “milling” creates a stagnancy in routine for the middle aged through Lizzie. The precarity of the future and Lizzie’s lifestyle where she spends majority of the article exposed to these new ideas of the Anthropocene, Kruger believes that one who conforms to this stagnant lifestyle is incapable of making an action towards working against the true danger because they’re too distracted by precariousness and not focused on the present disaster that they’re living in.

For my research, I used Google Scholar.

Research Question: What are the most effective strategies Offill uses to combat environmental and social traditionalism in Weather?

1. Abarrio, Ruben Peinado “FRAGMENTED AND BEWILDERING: THE NEW RISK SOCIETY IN JENNY OFFILL’S WEATHER.”, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, vol. 26 pp. 1 – 23. http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/REN.2022.i26.11. Accessed November 28th, 2022.

2. Amitav, Ghosh “The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable.”, The University of Chicago Press. Accessed 2016

3. Clausen, Daniel “Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.”, Western American Literature, Vol. 56, No. 3-4, Fall-Winter 2021, pp. 269 – 286. University of Nebraska Press, https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2021.0040.

4. Jarr, Sana’ Mahmoud “The Peril of Climate Change in Jenny Offill’s Weather.”, Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices, vol. 6 (2), pp. 45 – 50. Journal of World Englishes and Educational Practices, https://doi.org/10.32996/jweep.2024.6.2.5. Published June 1st, 2024.

In Chapter 2 of “Weather”, Offill brings more attention to upcoming climatic issues, through this, Offill sets a contrast between Lizzie and other characters; where Lizzie represents the informed and the other characters represent the naysayers and through that we see the relationship between the mindsets when stacked against each other, and the relationship between the mindsets and landscape.

An example of this can be found at the start of the chapter, where it is stated that, “…One thing that’s becoming clear on our travels people are really sick of being lectured about the glaciers. ‘Listen I’ve heard all about that,’ says the red-faced man. ‘But what is going to happen to the American weather?'” (Offill, Pg. 73) This piece of evidence emphasizes why the man fails to understand the significance of the glacier melting problem. He dismisses the information because he’s already heard it before, and only seems to care about “…American weather.” This situation is like the one that Ghosh exposes in his article titled, ‘The Great Derangement’, where he uses Hurricane Sandy as an example of how people are dismissive towards climatic issues, “No such instinct was at work in New York during Sandy…it was generally believed that ‘losing one’s life to a hurricane is…something that happens in faraway places.” (Ghosh, Pg. 25) The man in Offill’s example follows the same mentality, since it doesn’t affect where he lives, he doesn’t care; this isn’t the only form of dismissiveness that we see within the chapter.

Among Lizzie’s experiences of getting educated in, “climate departure”, Lizzie shares some of her insight onto Ben; his reaction to it was, “I only believe in math”, he mumbled. “Show me the math, okay?” (Offill, Pg. 88) This interaction indicates multiple things, for one it indicates the common ignorance that’s geared towards climatic issues, despite Lizzie’s ability to be educated on the topic, from a presumably credible source given that she’s read letters from scientists within the subject of these issues, Ben’s naysay attitude stops him from learning anything; it reveals how ‘naysayers’ percieve the informed as moments later he calls Lizzie, “…a crazy doomer.” (Offill, Pg. 89) Diminishing Lizzie as “mental” for expressing rightful concern about the landscape, while being so ignorant as to dismiss anything she has to say because it doesn’t abide by his way of processing information. Finally, it emphasizes the relationship between the informed and the landscape, we see that once Lizzie was given information her first course of action was to spread awareness and pass around this information in hopes of educating the people around her of the significance of these potential climate atrocities. Showing that those who are informed cultivate their information as a symbol of care for the land they inhabit, seeing this as an urgent issue enough to insist on telling other people about.

In Conclusion, Chapter 2 of Weather highlights the relationships between mindsets, and the mind and land through Lizzie and her interactions with other character’s ideas of climate significance.

In Weather, How does Offill use Lizzie and her experiences to challenge both environmental and social traditionalism?

The novel, “Weather” by Jenny Offill surrounds the life of Lizzie, who is a librarian at a college campus and works a side job at answering letters that are submitted to a podcast titled, “Hell and High Water”. In comparison to the protagonists of “Parable of The Sower” and “The Hungry Tide”, Lizzie is the “most normal” protagonist that we have encountered in our novels that we’ve read in this course. Lizzie’s character is the embodiment of the average American citizen, Working Class, and a Parent. This makes it so Lizzie is more relatable to the reader, giving us a glimpse of how average people would approach these scenarios. However, what separates Lizzie from Lauren and Piya, is also what separates Weather from the other novels; it’s that there’s a very slow progression as the novel focuses on an average person’s life.

Despite all that, there are still little elements of “cli-fi” that are touched upon through the letter submissions that Lizzie encounters and the podcast, and through that we can see how Offill interprets the average person to react to, “climate fiction.” As an example, on Page 46 it reads, “Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are at the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved.” (Offill, Pgs. 47 and 48) This piece of evidence can be connected to Fraizer’s piece on Parable of the Sower, where in it he criticizes the ideology of humans being the “peak” of biological species as this creates a narcissistic attitude towards other lifeforms. This is significant as this critical level of thinking around the subject of human’s and biological hierarchy being formed in “Weather” creates a message that the average person can easily approach this weird relationship that humans have with being evolutionally superior on a hierarchal level without having to be an ecocritical writer and researcher.

Continuing with Offill pushing towards ideas that has been argued in this course by the critical essayists that we’ve read from in this course, one that caught my attention was found on Page 55, where in it, its stated, “…there’s an expert giving advice about how to survive disasters, natural and man-made. He says it’s a myth that people panic in emergencies. Eighty percent just freeze. The brain refuses to take in what’s happening. This is called the incredulity response, ‘Those who live move…'” (Offill, Pg. 55) This piece of evidence connects to the reading that we’ve read from Clausen’s Georgic article; In the article, Clausen references Parable of The Sower, and how Lauren’s experience and diary could be used as a “survival guide” for anyone who finds themselves suffering the consequences of a rundown society at the expense of a disaster. The evidence used from Offill’s novel can be interpreted as some form of foreshadowing, where the advice is needed for an upcoming disaster that is unknown to both the characters and the reader.

In Conclusion, Weather’s ability to create a “common” or “average” model whether it be through characters or progression, develops a common ground between the readers and the critical essayists where they can approach to the same ideas about “cli-fi”, without the reader of the novel feeling alienated.