Everyday Apocalypse: Minor Realism in the Contemporary Climate Novel

Abstract

This dissertation identifies and theorizes “minor realism” as an understudied feature of many contemporary climate novels. While scholarly attention regarding the literary representation of climate change has grown significantly since the 1990s, realism—a style that depicts ordinary life through detailed description and psychological interiority—remains overlooked in most studies. Literary scholars tend to assume that realism, given its modest scale and focus on daily life, cannot encompass environmental disasters of unprecedented origin and magnitude. I offer “minor realism” as a term that emphasizes aesthetic and generic porosity, demonstrating that realism in fact valences a wide range of contemporary climate novels (including some that are typically read as nonrealist). Examining a broad contemporary archive of U.S. novels between 1991 and 2017, I track how minor realism represents climate change as an everyday experience. I offer sustained interpretations of six novels: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991), Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017). These analyses primarily employ close reading methodologies as well as supplemental archival study. Beyond the environmental humanities, I apply insights from memory studies, Indigenous critical theory, Black studies, and disability studies to analyze narratives of climate disaster. Bringing together such theoretical interlocutors, I argue that minor realism offers a surprising aesthetic resource for representing climate change and its unevenly dispersed effects.