“Literature and the Unthinkable : Writing the Great Derangement” Françoise Kràl, 30 mars 2026
Le lundi 30 mars à 17h15, le séminaire Seeds of Literature de l’Université de Picardie (CORPUS) recevra Françoise Král (Université Paris Nanterre) pour une conférence intitulée “Literature and the Unthinkable : Writing the Great Derangement”.
Plus d’informations sur https://seeds.hypotheses.org
zoom link:
https://u-picardie-fr.zoom.us/j/91980724594?pwd=5v9SfqEVsrVBs24YMINEhNMWQALCUj.1
Abstract:
In the second half of the 20th century, the question of the End has emerged in fiction as well as in non-fiction and theory, partly as a response to the looming consequences of climate change. Yet the End angst, whose appearance is more recent in the literatures of countries of the Global North than in those of the Global South, is not entirely new in European literary history, as novelist Amitav Ghosh reminds us in his 2008 non-fiction book The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2008). 1816, referred to some as the “year without a summer”, due to the release of over one hundred cubic kilometers of debris into the air as a result of the eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815, is known to have led to the completion of four literary pieces including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Polidori’s The Vampyre, as well as a piece by Percy Bysshe Shelley and the poem “Darkness” by Byron. It remains the case, however, that authors from the Global South have developed an awareness of the impact of climate change long before it came to attention in the humanities and in civil society at large.
I propose to reflect on how contemporary literature responds to the challenge of the exhaustion, not only of aesthetic forms, but more largely of resources through a focus on Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria and Amitav Ghosh’s novels The Hungry Tide and Gun Island. Drawing on the recent work of anthropologists such as Charles Stepanoff, I propose to focus on how the performativity of language in literature is called upon to help us adjust to the inversion of paradigms implied by writing about catastrophes (Balibar).
Françoise Král is Professor of British literature and Head of the CREA Research Centre at Paris Nanterre University. She published four monographs, Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (Palgrave 2009), Social Invisibility in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2014), Sounding out History (Nanterre University Press 2017) and La Colère des langues, Imaginaires polyglottes à l’ère de la mondialisation (Classiques Garnier 2024).
Françoise Král works on diasporas through a focus on literature and the visual arts. She studies the imaginaries of diasporas: linguistic imaginaries, spatial imaginaries in the context of literary geographies, and temporal imaginaries with regard to the question of the End and its centrality in diasporic writings, as well as the imaginary of humans’ relations with the living world (“le vivant”).
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (24 mars 2026). “Literature and the Unthinkable : Writing the Great Derangement” Françoise Kràl, 30 mars 2026. Écopoétique. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15xvr
