Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- author. aut

The great derangement : climate change and the unthinkable / Amitav Ghosh.

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
©2016

196 pages ; 22 cm.

The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures

"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, makes 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."--Jacket.

9780226323039 (cloth ; alk. paper)
022632303X (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780226526812 (paper)
022652681X (paper)
(e-book)
9780226323176
022632317X

Climatic changes in literature.
Climat Changements, dans la littérature.
LITERARY CRITICISM.
NATURE Environmental Conservation & Protection.
POLITICAL SCIENCE.
SCIENCE Earth Sciences.
Literature.
Literatur
Klimaänderung
Klimaschutz
Climatic changes History.
Climatic changes Political aspects.

Lecture
lectures.
Lectures
Conférences.

Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures.

Location: Library main 293794
Call No.: BIB 238975
Status: Available