LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” Anthropocene Reading, edited by Jesse Oak Taylor and Tobias Menely, vol. 1, Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 220–38,

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271080390-013.

• LeMenager argues how the Anthropocene is embedded within everyday life. She introduces Butler’s concept of the “everyday Anthropocene.” In the reading LeMenager explains how Butler uses the everyday Anthropocene in his novels as the “pox,” which is a “socioecological disease,” caused by “climatic, economic, and sociological crises”(223.) The “everyday Anthropocene” demonstrated through a socioecological disease is seen through Weather, as Lizzie balances her own existential dread, eco-anxiety, her job, and care for others ( Henry, Ben, Eli, Catherine, her mother.) LeMenager’s inclusion of Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” is also captured through the fragmented structure of the novel. In order to move forward, LeMenager explains how we must learn how to let go and learn how to die. I will use this idea to demonstrate how by the end of Weather, Lizzie has given up attempting to control her existential dread, and rather accepts it. LeMenager’s reinterpretation of love in the Anthropocene is also something I will use as Lizzie by the end of the novel, finds different ways to express love, for herself, for others, and her community.

Caracciolo, Marco. “Short Forms for Eco-Anxiety: Cognitive Realism in Climate Fiction.” Theory Now (Online), vol. 8, no. 2, 2025, pp. 10–29.

https://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/TNJ/article/view/30745/29756

• This piece discusses how eco-anxiety novels are able to evoke existential dread. Caracciolo also touches on “slow violence” and “ontological security”(13.) I would say that throughout the novel, Lizzie’s ontological security is threatened as she becomes hyper aware of the climate crisis that is affecting her emotional stability. Caracciolo argues that eco-anxiety is paralysing to a point where it is difficult to imagine a future. Furthermore, Caracciolo discusses how digital technologies further contribute to this eco-anxiety, more specifically, he uses the term “doomscrolling”(16.) Similar to how Lizzie doomscrolls through emails, podcasts, and televised news.

Mayer, Sylvia. “Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Jenny Offill’s Weather.” Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2025, https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.227

• Mayer discusses how resilience is built through “angry optimism,” as well as “quiet optimism.” Mayer uses Sylvia as a perfect example of resilience as she is introduced into the novel as a woman with a podcast attempting to slow down climate change as well as her attempt to move towards a future where humans and animals are able to coexist. However, this attempt to change the morals of those around her leads her to exhaustion. Mayer explains how Sylvia’s retreat and reintroduction to the end of the novel where she is watering her plants, demonstrates how important solidarity is for self-preservation. Sylvia watering her garden also relates to growing something meaningful in order to maintain “quiet optimism” as Mayer describes.

Mahmoud, Jarrar. “The Peril of Climate Change in Jenny Offil’s Weather (2020).”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382936745_The_Peril_of_Climate_Change_in_Jenny_Offill’s_Weather_2020

• This article discusses the psychological and physical effects of eco-anxiety. As well as eco-paralysis, the inability to see a future resulting from eco-anxiety.

Dudley, Jack. “Beckett, Atwood, and Postapocalyptic Tragicomedy.” Novel : A Forum on Fiction, vol. 54, no. 1, 2021, pp. 104–19,

https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8868833.

• Dudley demonstrates how Atwood uses “survival laughter” in Beckett’s tragicomedy as a tool to move past a state of paralysis amidst an ecological catastrophe. As well as adaptation and mitigation strategies as resilience. In Weather, Lizzie uses these adaptation and mitigation strategies within fragments of the novel, such as through survival techniques, religious and spiritual reliefs.

Research Question : How can we reimagine a utopia through existentialism in the ‘Everyday Anthropocene” in Offill’s novel, Weather

1.  Caracciolo, Marco. “Short Forms for Eco-Anxiety: Cognitive Realism in Climate Fiction.” Theory Now (Online), vol. 8, no. 2, 2025, pp. 10–29, https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v8i2.30745.
2. Sylvia Mayer. “Narratives of Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis: Angry Optimism and Utopian Minimalism in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Jenny Offill’s Weather.” Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2025, https://doi.org/10.47060/jaaas.v6i2.227.
3. Toole, Maggie. “The Obligation to Tear Through the Veil: An Analysis and Transformation of Mankind’s Insufficient Complacency Through the Novels of Jenny Offill.” Meliora (New York), vol. 1, no. 2, 2022, https://doi.org/10.52214/meliora.v1i2.8727.
4. LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” Anthropocene Reading, edited by Jesse Oak Taylor and Tobias Menely, vol. 1, Penn State University Press, 2021, pp. 220–38, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271080390-013.
5. Budziszewska, Magdalena, and Sofia Elisabet Jonsson. “From Climate Anxiety to Climate Action: An Existential Perspective on Climate Change Concerns Within Psychotherapy.” The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167821993243.
6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382936745_The_Peril_of_Climate_Change_in_Jenny_Offill’s_Weather_2020
7. Dudley, Jack. “Beckett, Atwood, and Postapocalyptic Tragicomedy.” Novel : A Forum on Fiction, vol. 54, no. 1, 2021, pp. 104–19, https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8868833.

The annotations I have collected were from Hunter Library. With this, I’d like to explain how Jenny Offill’s weather brings up eco-anxiety and a sense of existentialism. By defining what it is, the effects of eco-anxiety, how in Offills novel, Lizzie copes with this feeling, how otehr characters cope. Proper ways to deal with this existentialism. Similar to how Dudley uses Becketts use of tragic comic to NOT deal with the Anthropocene, Dudley uses Atwood’s novel as an example of how tragic comic is useful. I will demonstrate how eco anxiety and existentialism is necessary in order to reimagine a utopia while living in the Anthropocene.

How can we reimagine a utopia through existentialism in the ‘Everyday Anthropocene” in Offill’s novel, Weather?

In ” Weather”,  Offil uses fragments of Lizzie’s everyday life to depict the “everyday Anthropocene” as LeMenager builds on. In Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre, LeMenagers explains that living in the “everyday Anthropocene” is simply “paying close attention to what it means to live through climate shift, moment by moment, in individual frail bodies”(225). The structure of Offill’s novel is able to present this moment by moment more clearly. Lizzie’s hyperawareness of global disaster as a mother, sister, sister-in-law, and friend in everyday moments is exactly what LeMenager describes as the “everyday Anthropocene”. Offill furthermore, redefines love in the Anthropocene through simple everyday experiences, compassion for community and family, and through memory. Lizzie’s care for her brother and son to even Jimmy, the cab driver. In order to redefine love, we must learn how to let go. LeMenagers definition of letting go is “ losing any trappings of social transcendence”(229). In one scene where Sylvia is attempting to focus on conservation and renewal of the earth entirely, the men are focused on Wooly Mammoths and Saber-tooth tigers, objects of value. With “techno-optimist” men, Lizzie thinks how important it is to remember the past. Similarly, in Oryx and Crake, Atwood demonstrates how these technological advancements and capitalist industries can lead to apocalyptic events while Jimmy recognizes the importance in his memories of the past and how important it is for him to care for the Crakers. In, The Hungry Tide, we see this value community, religion, and value of remembering the past through Nirmal teaching the younger generation about the lands geological history. Once we learn how to let go, we are able to reimagine love. Furthermore, in Weather, Sylvia explains that us humans are “nothing particularly special”(47)”, that we are just animals that privilege our wants. In Donna Haraways, “Making Kin”, she explains that through the Cthulucene, we are able to break down hierarchy between humans and animals. Haraway explains “ One way to live and die well as moral critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperations and recomposition.” In another moment, Eli asks “ But we are animals, right?(35)”. Similar to Jimmy’s care and consideration for the Crakers in Oryx and Crake, Offill’s Weather explains how to reimagine love, we must also let go of our own selfish desires and extend our compassion for other non-human critters. This idea of joining forces with refugees can also be seen through Lizzie’s compassion for Jimmy, the can driver. He is just barely surviving in an industry that is dominated by capitalists, yet Lizzie chooses to support his business thinking, “ But what if I am the only customer he has left?”(20). This refugee care is shown through Ghosh’s novel as well.

In Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”, another key element I had noticed was the women’s efforts within the novel. Through characters like Piya, Nilima, Monya and Kusum, Ghosh reimagines survival through a feminist lens, one where coexistence with nature and and having empathy over ‘others’ is essential.

Through Piya, although she is Bengali she is linguistically and culturally an outsider. As a foreigner and a woman, she is constantly in unfamiliar environments being left to fend for herself as she navigates a male dominated world. These struggles as a woman parallels Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, where Oryx is also surviving through enduring these struggles. On the other hand, Piya, unlike Oryx, is able to fight this oppression despite her foreignness both in culture and as a woman. Examples of this is when Piya encounters the boat owner, the guard and even Kanai. In the beginning of the novel where Kanai first saw Piya,  Kanai had immediately thought of Piya as a romantic figure, explaining “there was no reason to not savor whatever pleasures might be on offer.(14)” This moment had already placed Piya in a common situation, where women are considered objects of male desire. This persistence with Kanai towards Piya is evident through the novel.

Nilima and Monya further expand on this feminist consciousness. Nilima motherly love for her community is shown through the Women’s Union, and her efforts to fund the hospital in Lusibari. Nilima explains “ It did not matter what they were; what mattered was that they should not remain what they were (68)”. Unlike capitalist systems, Nimila creates a community for women where there is no patriarchal hierarchy. Monya is also an example of the divisions between men and women in the novel. In the chapter, “A Disturbance”, Kanai is insisting to Monya to explain why she married Fokir, explaining that he will understand since he knows four languages, a logical reasoning. To which Monya replies “ It doesn’t matter how many languages you know.. you’re not a woman, and you don’t know him. You won’t understand (130).” This moment shows an epistemological division between knowledge rooted in logic and relationally and knowledge from lived experiences.

This mode of understanding the world through a feminist lens becomes essential in the Anthropocene, where patriarchal logic, male domination, and biopolitical logic is unable to overcome a post-ecological crisis. This brings us back to Ciobanu’s reading in “Rewriting the Human at the End of the Anthropocene in Marget Atwood’s MaddAdam Trilogy.” In this reading, we see that this female ethics of incommensurability is how we are able to move forward without repeating the same mistakes that brought us to the Anthropocene.