Ecology and Epiphany in Short Fiction by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates

This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits planetary damage. These build on a longer literary history of modern fiction, that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, mundane, but these also adapt to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change twenty-first century. Through close readings Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Lazy River” (2017), Oates’s “Sinners Hands an Angry God” I show how stories’ epiphanies invite reader emotionally urgency crisis take action. While important arguments Amitav Ghosh Rob Nixon argue literature must make visible, suggest some contemporary writers now face different issue, not need heighten visibility damage, rather psychologically its terrible obviousness.