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Globalgia and the loss of planetary home in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and John Lanchester’s The Wall
Dalarna University, School of Language, Literatures and Learning, English. (Interkulturella studier)
2021 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

In 2005 philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” as a psychological response to negative and often radical environmental changes in one’s home. For Albrecht, the increasing threat from “human-induced change such as war, terrorism, land clearing, climate change, mining, rapid institutional change” to our “solace” in a home milieu is an increasing cause for a sense of loss “nostalgia”, which causes “anguish or pain (algia)”. This presentation takes its bearings from Albrecht’s concept and the transnational turn in literary studies, and thus provides a literary-critical reading of two contemporary dystopian novels, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019). These novels are examples of speculative fiction, in that they provide fictional, future scenarios or ‘future histories’, to borrow Brian Stableford’s term, which include a high degree of “rational plausibility” within these “fictional constructs”. Consequently, this presentation extends the psychological-ecological, and contemporary, notion of solastalgia into the dystopian genre in general and future depictions in The Road and The Wall specifically. Ultimately, through literary analysis this paper illustrates a move beyond solastalgia, where the physic territory of the home has shifted onto a global scale, as a response to massive ecological devastation and desolation that I will call ‘globalgia’. In other words, the term is an attempt to theorise and categorise psychological-affective responses to fictional scenarios where the entire planetary system is recognised in the pain causing loss-of-home. I will argue that this notion informs aspects of characterisation and plot in the novels and that it can in turn offer the reader an understanding of solastalgia that is more in line with the level of ‘hyperobject’ proposed by Timothy Morton.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
National Category
General Literature Studies
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:du-35926OAI: oai:DiVA.org:du-35926DiVA, id: diva2:1523945
Conference
Living in the End Times:Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture: A Virtual Interdisciplinary Conference hosted by Cappadocia University, Turkey, January 13 – 15, 2021
Available from: 2021-01-29 Created: 2021-01-29 Last updated: 2023-04-14Bibliographically approved

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https://blog.kapadokya.edu.tr/akademik/ingiliz-dili-ve-edebiyati/international-conference-living-in-the-end-times-utopian-and-dystopian-representations-of-pandemics-in-fiction-film-and-culture

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Gray, David

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CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

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Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • chicago-author-date
  • chicago-note-bibliography
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
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