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.
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.
Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose books include The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and the Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire.
In this way, through a series of successive exclusions,Mallabarman creates a space that will submit to thetechniques of a modern novel: the rest of the landscapeis pushed farther and farther into the background untilat last we have a setting that can carry a narrative. Thesetting becomes, in a sense, a self-contained ecosystem,with the river as the sustainer both of life and of the narrative....[epics] embraces the inconceivably large almost to the same degree that the novel shuns it. Novels, on the other hand, conjure up worlds that become real precisely because of their finitude and distinctiveness.” (查看原文)
Only then did it strike me that the location of that base in the Nicobars was by no means anomalous ; the builders had not in any sense departed from accepted global norms. To the contrary, they had merely followed the example of the European colonists who had founded cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai), New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, all of which are sited directly on the ocean. I understood also that what I had seen in the Nicobars was but a microcosmic expression of a pattern of settlement that is now dominant around the world: proximity to the water is a sign of affluence and education; a seafront location is a status symbol; an ocean view greatly increases the value of real estate. A colonial vision of the world, in which proximity to the water represents power and secur... (查看原文)
因为上课又双叒叕完整读一遍。Environmental uncanny, climate change as unthinkable and unnarratable, the crisis of literary fiction (read: 19C European realist style fiction) in the Anthropocene. 形式和人类世的关系到底更多是个文类问题还...因为上课又双叒叕完整读一遍。Environmental uncanny, climate change as unthinkable and unnarratable, the crisis of literary fiction (read: 19C European realist style fiction) in the Anthropocene. 形式和人类世的关系到底更多是个文类问题还是阐释学问题？(展开)
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阿米塔夫·高希 作者
2 有用 tsko3o.__.slw 2022-01-24 15:44:47
horrible book. 可能因为我已经远离文学研究多年导致第一部分读完只觉得可笑：时至今日小说是否还能被笼统地谈论，但如果说是一种文学性的想象，那又何必非要用一种自称不是伦理的政治正确来评判？如果第一部分只是好笑，第二部分就是pure shame了：将工业化、现代化、殖民和去殖民的进程简单地通过（人均）碳排放来解读，似乎是站在某种批判殖民主义现代性的但批判的逻辑有在不断再生产殖民现代性的线性... horrible book. 可能因为我已经远离文学研究多年导致第一部分读完只觉得可笑：时至今日小说是否还能被笼统地谈论，但如果说是一种文学性的想象，那又何必非要用一种自称不是伦理的政治正确来评判？如果第一部分只是好笑，第二部分就是pure shame了：将工业化、现代化、殖民和去殖民的进程简单地通过（人均）碳排放来解读，似乎是站在某种批判殖民主义现代性的但批判的逻辑有在不断再生产殖民现代性的线性逻辑。就 很 迷 。 (展开)
0 有用 enthalpy 2021-11-04 01:54:14
补标（上周读的）。很有意思，第一部分stories，讨论了why fiction/the novel cannot address Anthropocene：小说这一体裁是以“人”和个体自由为核心，因此与气候变化、人类世等超越个体经验的范畴互相排斥；第二部分history，讨论与工业革命和气候变暖有关的帝国扩张、资本史和殖民史，甚至提出了西方殖民、资本扩张是否延缓了气候变暖的进程，以及由此变暖的历... 补标（上周读的）。很有意思，第一部分stories，讨论了why fiction/the novel cannot address Anthropocene：小说这一体裁是以“人”和个体自由为核心，因此与气候变化、人类世等超越个体经验的范畴互相排斥；第二部分history，讨论与工业革命和气候变暖有关的帝国扩张、资本史和殖民史，甚至提出了西方殖民、资本扩张是否延缓了气候变暖的进程，以及由此变暖的历史责任是否会变化等问题；最后一部分politics，涉及气候变暖的全球治理，对UN2015《巴黎协定》和2015 Pope Francis《教皇通谕》的比较分析尤其特别。全书广泛涉及英、美、中国和南亚国家的社会历史，惊叹于作者的广博学识，尤其是对中国历史、文学经典、思想的了解。 (展开)
0 有用 heterotopia 2023-10-13 05:41:15 美国
因为上课又双叒叕完整读一遍。Environmental uncanny, climate change as unthinkable and unnarratable, the crisis of literary fiction (read: 19C European realist style fiction) in the Anthropocene. 形式和人类世的关系到底更多是个文类问题还... 因为上课又双叒叕完整读一遍。Environmental uncanny, climate change as unthinkable and unnarratable, the crisis of literary fiction (read: 19C European realist style fiction) in the Anthropocene. 形式和人类世的关系到底更多是个文类问题还是阐释学问题？ (展开)
0 有用 Yinanaa 2024-05-31 18:30:51 荷兰
Part 1.
0 有用 喳精 2022-04-12 05:34:46
读了第三部分 因为气候变化的instantiation（看起来）太荒诞/灾难/巧合所以无法写得（看起来）日常/真实 是啊 人类还生活在一种觉得灾难是例外的迷思和想象中 即便现在什么是eventful什么是mundane在人类世中早已分不清了...