Affects of Disaster: Briohny Doyle’s Reframing of Climate Narrative In The Island Will Sink

Abstract: As it highlights the production and consumption of climate narratives, Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink invites attention to ways that climate texts might suspend as well as provoke feeling and action. Adapting conventions of disaster movies to forge the form and content of her novel, Doyle investigates how an aging filmmaker and his family use climate texts to navigate the potential end of the world. While carefully contextualizing individual interactions with a range of climate narratives and illuminating ways that socioeconomic status positions creators and users of texts, the novel critiques disaster plots that stage spectacles which soothe audiences with promises of salvation. Doyle refuses to offer her readers such comfort, instead illuminating the power of self-reflexive climate novels to open space to confront complex and contradictory ways audiences use climate narratives to negotiate the realities of climate crisis.