'Fragmented and Bewildering:' The New Risk Society in Jenny Offill's Weather

Peinado Abarrio, Rubén (Universidad de Zaragoza)

Resumen: US author Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020) shows her idiosyncratic take on the notion of risk society. In the novel and its accompanying website, Offill develops a type of anxious fragmentation as an answer to the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A multiple text characterized by compulsive quotation and the formal influence of digital media, Weather is held together by a first-person confessional voice. Eventually, Offill manages to achieve a sense of interconnection through an aesthetics of the fragment thanks to a double movement: she favors a critical posthumanist perspective that understands the interrelational subject as constituted by interaction with multiple others, and she explicitly calls for collective action. Therefore, I conclude that Weather represents Offill’s both aesthetic and political quest, as she distinctly aspires to elicit an answer from readers in the form of social activism.

Idioma: Inglés

DOI: 10.12795/REN.2022.i26.11

Año: 2022

Publicado en: Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos 26 (2022), 1-23
ISSN: 1133-309X

Factor impacto CITESCORE: 0.1 - Arts and Humanities (Q4)

Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.101 - Literature and Literary Theory (Q4)

Tipo y forma: Artículo (Versión definitiva)

Área (Departamento): Área Filología Inglesa (Dpto. Filolog.Inglesa y Alema.)