Researcher(s):
Hannah Smay
ENVS course(s): 400 Initiated: September 2016 Completed: May 2017 Go to project site
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Like many scholars in the humanities, I ask what art and stories can offer a world unsettled by change. For the environmental studies, unsettling changes in the world often relate to fears of environmental crises. Including natural disasters under the umbrella of environmental crisis, I examine depictions of earthquakes across several fictional works from Japan and the Pacific Northwest, two places with high seismic risk. To better understand the experience of crisis through literature, I ask how and why authors from Japan and the Pacific Northwest render earthquakes in fiction. I explore Haruki Murakami’s short story collection after the quake written after the Kobe earthquake of 1995, Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being written after the 2011 Tohōku earthquake and tsunami, Adam Rothstein’s After the Big One which imagines a future earthquake in Portland, Oregon, and several other works. I find that through fictional representation, readers and writers alike are able to access the rhythms of the earth, the intimate experiences of others, and future worlds of crisis. By examining earthquake literature under a framework of ecocriticism, I establish the potential for literature to promote survival and resilience in crisis by forging intimate connections between earth systems, stories, and humans.