The hope-sparking gloominess in Offill’s Weather and Greengrass’s The High House in the perspective of Naess’s theory of deep ecology

Abstract

A man-nature relationship is as old as the existence of humanity on Earth. Obsessed by his ambitions, Man has built an inequitable relationship with nature, thinking that it exists to ensure his survival and prosperity regardless of its right to survive. The result was an apocalyptic change in the ecosystem, whose protection has become inescapable. Thus, many attempts by theorists and writers, beside scientists and ecologists, have been devoted to such a purpose. Although they sometimes vary in their premises, they have the same aim, namely the survival of the ecosystem. Cheryll Glotfelty’s Ecocriticism and Arne Naess’s theory of deep ecology belong to such a category. Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary movement that asserts the responsibility of literature towards the environment through the analysis of literary works about environmental issues. Notably, the diversity of approaches and multiplicity of interrelated waves are among the core features of Ecocriticism. Arne Naess represents such an ecocritical approach through his theory of deep ecology, which attempts to reconstruct the man-nature relationship from anthropocentrism into ecocentrism. Such a sense of environmentalist commitment is echoed in the Climate Change Fiction. Therefore, this paper aims to study Naess’s theory of deep ecology, as a representative of the ecocritical approach, to elucidate the influence of the climate change crisis on anthropogenic fiction. In addition, it examines diverse perspectives of novelists from different settings towards such a catastrophe, showing how these perspectives vary between hope and