“We Were Paralysed”: Ecological Grief, the Everyday Anthropocene, and Climate Crisis Ordinariness in The High House

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Carlill, Alice. 2025. “We Were Paralysed”: Ecological Grief, the Everyday Anthropocene, and Climate Crisis Ordinariness in The High House. English Studies, 106(3), pp. 373-394. ISSN 0013-838X [Article]

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2024.2428932

Abstract or Description

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.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2024.2428932