Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction
The Thought of the Disaster
- A comprehensive examination of a central, but undefined, aspect of Maurice Blanchot’s deeply influential thought, the disaster
- Sustains an argument for the importance of fiction for representing and comprehending catastrophic events
- Examines the complex relation between philosophy and fiction, suggesting a deeply reciprocal relation between artistic and philosophical responses to the disaster
Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic, and deeply influential, notion of the disaster – a term Blanchot famously refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Gee, Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the space of the imagination, as the place where some conception (ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges. These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding of critical events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Prelude: J.G Ballard’s Disastrous Worlds
1. Ecologies of Disaster: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13
2. Writing Extinction: Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones
3. Desire and Disaster: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
4. Posthumanism and Disaster: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
5. Disaster and Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood
Conclusion: The Gift of the Disaster
References
Index
Jonathan Boulter is the first to admit that he does not understand the disaster in Blanchot's thinking – which means that he understands it perfectly, as a thought that we cannot reach but that fatally reaches toward us, not least in the unsteady gesture of literary writing.
