CONFÉRENCE REPORTÉE

This talk addresses recent versions of the utopian literary imagination, as articulated in debates on the so-called Anthropocene - the epoch in which global human activities have begun to function as a geological force that reshapes the physical makeup of the planet. Zooming in on the writings of Amitav Ghosh, ​Gun Island (2019) in particular, this talk explores three striking aspects of recent climate change discourse, namely its focus on projected forms of climate migration, its preoccupation with the question of genre, and its cautious, complex embrace of religious imagery - what I will be calling its crisis spirituality. In various ways, we will see, Ghosh’s writing replaces conventional apocalyptic templates with unspectacular everyday narratives. Yet his fiction and nonfiction also leave room for fantasy, history, and spirituality - and offer contemporary readers a productive form of weak, limited utopianism.

Ben De Bruyn teaches English literature at UCLouvain, Belgium. He is the author of ​The Novel and the Multispecies Soundscape (Palgrave, in print) and the co-editor of ​Literature Now (Edinburgh UP, 2016). He has also published several articles on environmental literature in journals including ​Oxford Literary Review,​ ​Studies in the Novel​, and ​Textual Practice​.

Cette conférence aura lieu en anglais.