Book Cover
E-book
Author Ghosh, Amitav, 1956- author

Title The great derangement : climate change and the unthinkable / Amitav Ghosh
Published Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, [2016]
©2016

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Description 1 online resource (196 pages)
Series The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures
Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin family lectures
Contents Stories -- History -- Politics
Summary "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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 165-196)
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
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digitized 2020. HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Climatic changes in literature.
Climatic changes
Climate Change
climate change.
LITERARY CRITICISM.
NATURE -- Environmental Conservation & Protection.
POLITICAL SCIENCE.
SCIENCE -- Earth Sciences.
Literature.
Climatic changes
Climatic changes in literature
Literatur
Klimaänderung Motiv
Klimaschutz
Literature.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226323176
022632317X