“The World’s Basic Brokenness”: Eco-Anxiety and Solastalgia in Richard Powers’s Bewilderment
Bildiriler > Özet Bildiri · 2025
Yazarlar: Nesrin YAVAŞ
BAKEA 2025 9th International Western Cultural and Literaray Studies Symposium, Türkiye, Konya, Uluslararası, Sözlü Sunum, Özet Bildiri, 2025-2025, ss 10-11
Özet
<p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>Richard Powers’s novel <em>Bewilderment</em> (2021) portrays an intimate story of a father and son grappling with personal tragedy amid a planet in crisis. Set in a near-future United States facing accelerating environmental breakdown, the novel centers on astrobiologist Theo Byrne and his nine-year-old son, Robin, who is introduced as a “sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world” (Powers 7), an emotionally sensitive child overwhelmed by species extinctions, climate chaos, and the loss of his mother. Through their journey, Powers explores pressing questions about humanity’s relationship to a dying planet, offering a deeply affective portrait of ecological despair and hope. <em>Bewilderment</em> dramatizes solastalgia and eco-anxiety/grief as affective forces that do not end at the boundaries of individual psychology but circulate through narrative, culture, and ecology. This study will demonstrate that Powers’s novel becomes a prime site for exploring how ecological emotions are felt, mediated, and mobilized in the Anthropocene.</p><p>To adequately capture this complexity, this study is grounded in the interdisciplinary framework of affective ecocriticism to address three interrelated research questions: The first question focuses on how the characters exhibit what environmental philosopher Glenn Albrect defines as “psychoterratic dis-eases” such as solastalgia, eco-anxiety to ground these affective responses in embodied experience. The second question explores how the novel’s narrative structure and use of planetary storytelling mediate and intensify these emotions, emphasizing the affective power of narrative forms. The third question investigates the broader cultural and ethical implications of these emotions through Sara Ahmed’s theory of the cultural politics of emotion and Alexa Weik von Mossner’s concept of solastalgic distress. These frameworks together illuminate how affect circulates between bodies, texts, and communities, shaping not only how environmental grief is felt but also how it is shared, politicized, and narrated (Bladow and Latino 8). This critical approach situates environmental emotions at the intersection of embodiment, narrative, and ecology, emphasizing how affect circulates through cultural texts and social formations to produce epistemic and ethical effects. By deploying affective ecocriticism as a foundational lens, the present analysis examines Richard Powers’s novel <em>Bewilderment</em> to explore how solastalgia and eco-anxiety are not only lived experiences of environmental grief but also narratively and culturally mediated forces that compel ethical reflection and political engagement in the Anthropocene.</p><p><strong>Anahtar Kelimeler</strong>: eco-anxiety, environmental grief, solastalgia, affective ecocriticism, Anthropocene fiction</p>