Corbin Hiday Seminar: ” ‘A Crisis of the Imagination’: Towards a Poetics of Extraction”

Resident Graduate Seminar
Corbin Hiday, Department of English
Pre-circulated Seminar paper: ” ‘A Crisis of the Imagination’: Towards a Poetics of Extraction”

Recently, critics like Amitav Ghosh, Bob Johnson, Jennifer Wenzel, and the Petrocultures Research Group at the University of Alberta suggest that the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Ghosh, perhaps most famously in his status as novelist-critic, turns to the contemporary novel and claims that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” In this essay, I argue that this crisis has a prehistory in the nineteenth century, and that the global character of the fossil economy is inscribed in a transnational, transhistorical poetics of extraction. I read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World together in order to articulate how the relation between progress and exhaustion within fossil modernity presupposes crisis. In imagining energy regimes alongside catastrophe, these novels illustrate the dead ends of carbon modernity.

Register in advance for this zoom meeting:
https://uic.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkduyvrjgoGdFL2viSOLTVjY88yw16Jyay