We Were Paralysed
Ecological Grief, the Everyday Anthropocene, and Climate Crisis Ordinariness in The High House
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7761024 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alice Carlill (Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 373-394 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2024.2428932 |
| OpenAlex | W4404751710 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 37 |
Despite arguments to the contrary, this article contends that climate realism both is and is yet to become a useful and valuable genre for aestheticising an environmentally threatened and threatening present. It conceptualises Jessie Greengrass’s The High House as a contemporary novel that mobilises climate realism through the “everyday Anthropocene” paradigm to convey the affective experience of living through and with climate crisis for a Western Global North populace. This affective climate is most typified by a paralysing ecological grief that implicates the novel’s characters in wider political inertia. As such, I argue that The High House deploys climate realism to scrutinise the structures of feeling that directly or indirectly contribute to this inertia, intimating that a living with and through climate crisis – what can, after Lauren Berlant, be called climate crisis ordinariness – might in effect equate to political quiescence if not indirect complicity in ecocide
Anthropocene · Biology · Climate change · Ecological crisis · Environmental ethics · Grief · Psychiatry · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Ecology · History · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy · Psychology
The Implicated Subject
Cruel Optimism
Indigenous Climate Change Studies
What Comes after Entanglement
The Great Derangement
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Pockets
Introduction
Climate Lyricism
The Disposition of Nature
The Truth of Ecology
The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities
Negating Solastalgia
Climate Change as the Work of Mourning
The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis
Ecological Grief and Anthropocene Horror
Worlding beyond 'the' 'end' of 'the world
Catastrophic Form and Planetary Realism
What Does Biodiversity Loss Feel Like? Realism in the Age of Extinction
Hope and hopelessness
Climate Realism
Climate Change Fiction and the Future of Memory
Making sense of transience
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |