Structures of feeling in climate fiction

Abstract With a steady onslaught of extreme weather events and quickly surpassed temperature records, the climate crisis is increasingly moving from the realm of hypotheticals to that of lived experience. In this context, many sociologists have called for their discipline to make climate change a core agenda item. While climate change-focused sociology has certainly increased of late, a general dissatisfaction with the discipline’s treatment of the issue remains. Two obstacles to developing of a fully fledged “sociology of climate change” are tensions of temporality and scale; its global scope and a tendency to discuss it in terms of possible futures make it difficult to frame climate change in terms of the present-day and localized phenomena many sociologists study. I propose Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” as a cultural framework for studying climate change as it is actively experienced in the present. Williams used structures of feeling to describe the distinctive quality of experience that characterizes a period, and to challenge us to consider how the personal, affective realm of “feeling” is implicated in social processes that transcend us. Using computational methods and qualitative analysis and following Williams’ assertion that structures of feeling are most visible in creative work, I analyze short stories in the literary subgenre of “climate fiction.” I find a temporal shift in these works, where they transition between imagining the acute destruction of climate chaos and the possibilities of post-apocalypse. I take these shifts to indicate underlying patterns in the affective social experience of climate change.