Lukiolaiset Teemestarin kirjaa lukemassa: Ilmastokirjallisuuden herättämiä ajatuksia ja tunteita

Anna Helle, Toni Lahtinen, Olli Löytty & Panu Pihkala: Finnish high school students read Memory of Water – A study of emotions and thoughts evoked via cli-fiThis article discusses a case study in the field of empirical ecocriticism in which we investigated how high school students read climate fiction and how it affects them. We invited more than a hundred high school students, mostly 16 and 17 years old, to read a novel called Memory of Water (2014) by Finnish author Emmi Itäranta and tell about their thoughts and feelings that reading the book evoked. The material was collected from four different high schools in different parts of Finland. The material includes essays written by the students, questionnaire responses, and recorded group discussions.

In this article, we analyse the material using qualitative theory and datadriven content analysis. We focus on three themes that are important from the point of view of ecocriticism: identification, concretization of abstract phenomena, and effect of locality on the reading experience.Our research shows that literature affects readers in a more complex way than has been previously assumed. The high school students did not identify very strongly with the novel's young protagonists, contrary to what could have been assumed based on previous research. This is essential, because when evaluating the effectiveness of literature, identification is often thought to play a central role. However, according to our research, reading climate literature helps to imagine climate change and its consequences in a versatile way. Climate change is often considered difficult to comprehend, but the novel concretizes the abstract phenomenon.

The results regarding the importance of locality are twofold: On one hand, the location of the novel's events in the area of present-day Northern Finland in a dystopian future made a strong impact on some Northern Finnish readers. On the other hand, it was Finland as the setting that made the novel appear as unrealistic to some, because they thought that climate change will not affect Finland that forcefully. To our surprise, in addition to the climate message of the book, the act of reading itself also evoked emotions; a considerable number of high school students found reading an entire novel difficult and burdensome.