Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster

h4A reading of Blanchot’s idea of the disaster in relation to contemporary fiction of the United Kingdom and Ireland/h4ulliA comprehensive examination of a central, but undefined, aspect of Maurice Blanchot’s deeply influential thought, the disaster/liliSustains an argument for the importance of fiction for representing and comprehending catastrophic events/liliExamines the complex relation between philosophy and fiction, suggesting a deeply reciprocal relation between artistic and philosophical responses to the disaster/li/ulpiBlanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster/i 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./p Cover Half-Title Title Page Copyright Contents 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