6 March: CIDRAL Key Ideas seminar: ‘On Amtiv Ghosh, The Great Derangement’ led by Zoë Svendsen (Cambridge)

by | Mar 5, 2019 | Seminars | 0 comments

Our next CIDRAL Key Ideas seminar will be on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, led by Zoë Svendsen (Lecturer in Drama and Performance, University of Cambridge). This will be of interest to anybody working on climate change, the anthropocene and their cultural representations. 

Please do encourage any of your postgraduate students who may be interested to attend!

CIDRAL Key Ideas Seminar with Zoë Svendsen (Lecturer in Drama and Performance, University of Cambridge)

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

Wednesday 6 March, 1-3pm.

Room 3.22, Mansfield Cooper Building

Acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) 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.

Zoë Svendsen will lead a seminar which will explore Ghosh’s argument, and think about its implications for artistic and critical practice today.

Preparatory reading also available via the CIDRAL website.

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