The Great Derangement

Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Hardcover, 196 pages

English language

Published by University of Chicago Press, The University of Chicago Press.

ISBN:
978-0-226-32303-9
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OCLC Number:
944087613

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"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 …

5 editions

Subjects

  • Klimaänderung
  • POLITICAL SCIENCE
  • NATURE
  • SCIENCE
  • Earth Sciences
  • Literatur
  • Environmental Conservation & Protection
  • LITERARY CRITICISM
  • Klimaschutz
  • Climatic changes in literature