A Comparative Study of Solastalgia in Contemporary Post-Disaster Fiction

Abstract

The contemporary semiotic landscape exposes a high-tension dynamic between the progressive degradation of a habitat-milieu and the systemic deconstruction of identity structures. By investigating the isotopies of ruin across Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2011) and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), this exegesis interrogates the mutation of actants confronted with the profound erosion of spatiotemporal frameworks in distinct environments of collapse: hurricane-ravaged coastal Mississippi and war-torn Iraq. The study addresses a central research problem: How does spatial fragmentation in these narratives force a psychological and somatic reconstruction of the subject, turning bodily and mental anguish into the primary means of reclaiming a desolate world? To resolve this interrogation, the analytical approach deploys a rigorous methodological synergy, combining psychoanalysis and tensive semiotics with the comparative framework of trauma studies. The comparative finding reveals that Ward frames environmental trauma through the bio-somatic vulnerability of the rural American South. Saadawi, conversely, articulates it through necro-political landscapes where human debris forms a grotesque body politic. Despite these differences, both authors use bodily fragmentation as a signifying anchor when traditional spatial referents collapse. Structurally, the inquiry unfolds along two major axes: Phenomenology of Loss and the Corporeal Landscape, which examines how bodily endurance mirrors environmental devastation, and Necro-Politics and the Aesthetics of Salvage, which investigates the systemic commodification of life and the makeshift recovery of identity from rubble. This investigation offers an innovative theoretical paradigm, bridging ecocriticism and trauma theory to decode how localized catastrophes generate universal semiotic languages of survival amid terminal planetary decay today.