What does it mean to write about climate change? Special issue of Diacritics on writing and thinking on climate change from the perspective of literary criticism.
We might go to an extreme and suggest that whether or not we explicitly take up climate change in our writing (critical, creative, institutional-bureaucratic, or otherwise), climate change takes us up. Writing in the time of climate change—even critical writing engaged with texts from before the widespread extraction of fossil fuels—is necessarily untimely, out of joint with familiar modes of thinking and being, no matter how heterogeneous these may be. As universal subjects under the globalized umbrella of heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, we have come to the threshold of a radical geo-epistemological break, but one that we may have to suppress in order to go on writing. As Ian Baucom has written in an essay as subtle as it is devastating, we are forced to search for a new method that might—remotely—respect the chaotic multidimensionality of being-as-geology, of a radically changed earth. Pinkus, Karen, 2013, Diacritics, Volume 41, Number 3, 2013. p.3-4.
Accessible from within the University network, highly recommended! You can find it here: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/toc/dia.41.3.html