CIDRAL Key Ideas seminar: ‘On Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement’ led by Zoë Svendsen (Cambridge)
| Dates: | 6 March 2019 |
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| Times: | 13:00 - 15:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's Spring 2019 programme, 'Work, Leisure, Culture'.
Zoë Svendsen (Lecturer in Drama and Performance, University of Cambridge) will lead a key ideas seminar on Amtiv Ghosh's 'The Great Derangement'.
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 exploreGhosh’s argument, and think about its implications forartistic and critical practice today.
Preparatory reading available at: https://bit.ly/2Vkt8Dg
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3.22
Mansfield Cooper Building
Manchester
