Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues
that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our
imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major
book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our
inability—at the level of literature, history, and politics—to
grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of
today’s climate events, Ghosh asserts, make them peculiarly
resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is
particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and
freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are
automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history,
too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications;
Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global
story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh
ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a
matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective
action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral
adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine
other forms of human existence—a task to which fiction, Ghosh
argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a
great writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
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Climate Change and the Unthinkable
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226323176
Publisert
2018
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter