Susan Neville: Barometric Pressure (January 2006)

Susan Neville examines how climate can serve not as a backdrop for narrative action but as part of the pressure that creates that action. She conducts close readings of several novels, giving particular attention to Mann’s Magic Mountain and Kawabata’s Snow Country, to examine how climate in fiction can work as “the uncanny, mysterious other… the thing one spirals back to again and again.” A 20-minute discussion with students and faculty follows the 50-minute lecture.