Discuss in small groups for 15 mins. Designate someone (preferably a “lifeline”) to represent the main points to peers at the end:

1. Weather is a first-person novel, if an unconventional one. The narrative, therefore, issues from an “I.” But who is that “I” addressing? For much of the novel, it feels as if we readers are “overhearing” something private and inner, but starting in Part Five the “you” starts to loom larger. How do you read the pivot towards the second person in the novel, toward us as readers, in effect? How does it change the tone of the novel in the last two sections?
2. The novel form is organized around endings: as with an individual life, we don’t know what the beginning and the middle mean, in some sense, until the end. Lizzie is obsessed with worry about how things will end: her son’s childhood, her marriage, her brother’s mental health, and, well, the state of the entire world. How does the novel negotiate its own ending? How does the ending make you feel? How does the “closure” the novel provides reflect back on its own many references to time and temporality?
3. Religion, or its more informal and secular cousin spirituality, is a theme common to all three texts we’ve read this term. Lizzie approaches religion with a mix of longing and irony throughout the novel, most notably when she and Ben attempt to be Unitarian Universalists. How does religion, or at least a spiritual feeling, return at the end of the novel? What do you think Offill is getting at with the references to sacred feelings and practices as the novel closes?

Think for 2 mins, Pair for 2 mins, Share for a bit:

We’ve done a lot of close reading of literary critical essays this term (with two more to come next week). What skills have you developed? When confronted with the narrow, specialized form of the critical essay, what are you able to do with it, as a reader, that you couldn’t a few months ago? How might this impact your ability as a writer of your own critical essays?

How does Jenny Offill’s portrayal of climate change in “Weather” express the concept of slow violence, and how does this approach compare to the more traditional “critical dystopia” framework in Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”?

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt2jbsgw. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.

STILLMAN, PETER G. “Dystopian Critiques, Utopian Possibilities, and Human Purposes in Octavia Butler’s Parables.” Utopian Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2003, pp. 15–35. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718544. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.

“FRAGMENTED AND BEWILDERING:” THE NEW RISK SOCIETY IN JENNY OFFILL’S WEATHER. https://doi.org/10.12795/ren.2022.i26.11.

Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 336–60.

Smith, Stephanie A. “Octavia Butler: A Retrospective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2007, pp. 385–93. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20459148. Accessed 19 Nov. 2024.

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.

Works Cited

Pramod K. Nayar. “The Postcolonial Uncanny: The Politics of Dispossession in Amitav Ghosh’s the Hungry Tide.” College Literature, vol. 37, no. 4, 2010, pp. 88–119, https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2010.0011. Accessed 14 Nov. 2019.

Ratté , Lou . “Unlikely Encounters:Fiction and Scientific Discourse in the Novels of Amitav Ghosh.” History, Narrative, and Testimony in Amitav Ghosh’s Fiction, edited by Chitra Sankaran, State University of New York Press, 2012, pp. 17–32, www.jstor.org/stable/jj.18254311. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

White, Laura A. “Novel Vision: Seeing the Sunderbans through Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 513–31. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44087261. Accessed 14 Nov. 2024.

Alcoff, Linda Martín . “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 7, no. 3, 2008, pp. 79–101, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.0.0008.

‌Wilburn, Heather. “An Introduction to Western Epistemology.” Open.library.okstate.edu, Tulsa Community College, 18 Jan. 2021, open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/an-introduction-to-western-epistemology/.

Amitav Ghosh. The Hungry Tide. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

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