Read more
Zimmerman presents an interdisciplinary study of climate change and how the dominant discourses associated with it contribute to a form of cultural denial. It explores how the climate change discourse can be illuminated by framing it in terms of the trope of trauma, and considers how literary responses to the climate crisis participate in this.
List of contents
Introduction; Chapter 1: Pavel's Lament: Climate and Trauma; Chapter 2: What We Don't Talk about when We Talk about Global Warming; Chapter 3: Butcheries; Chapter 4: Climate Change and Fiction I: Disarticulations and The Great Derangement; Chapter 5: Climate Change and Fiction II: On Not Eating the Baby; Coda: The Burning Child
About the author
Lee Zimmerman is Professor of English at Hofstra University, USA, and editor of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature.
Summary
Zimmerman presents an interdisciplinary study of climate change and how the dominant discourses associated with it contribute to a form of cultural denial. It explores how the climate change discourse can be illuminated by framing it in terms of the trope of trauma, and considers how literary responses to the climate crisis participate in this.
Additional text
‘This is a necessary book. Our representations of climate change aren’t adequate, our modes of interpretation are evasive, and the actions and policies based on those representations and interpretations take us further toward an uninhabitable planet. Most perversely, as Zimmerman emphasizes, even our most apparently sincere engagements with the climate crisis turn out to be new forms of denial. We say we recognize the problem; then act as if we do not. In canny readings of uncanny texts, Zimmerman shows the missing parts and points to where our thinking needs to go.’
James Berger, Yale University, USA; author of After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse
‘In Trauma and the Discourse of Climate Change, Lee Zimmerman offers a brilliant, unforgiving, and much-needed analysis of what we talk about when we talk about climate change, and what we don’t talk about, and why. The book persuasively argues that the dominant discourses of global warming that enabled denialism are a reaction to the trauma of the knowledge of that crisis, of the threats it poses not only to the planet but to our ways of knowing our world and ourselves. As the earth burns, Zimmerman’s is a call to recognize our grief for what is being lost and to work to save what still stands.’
Samuel Cohen, University of Missouri, USA; author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s
‘Lee Zimmerman’s closely reasoned book is committed to telling 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but' about climate change—even as it explores how the "whole truth" will necessarily exceed our grasp. Zimmerman points out the major omissions in what many leading authors on this topic have said. Unlike Al Gore skipping over the inconvenient truths that were inconvenient to his ideological premises or other authors who felt, like Jack Nicholson’s character in "A Few Good Men," that the public can’t handle the truth, this book holds nothing back. The stakes are too high, the implications too significant, to do less.’
Michael D. Moore, Ph.D; founder, Core Narrative and former Senior Vice-President, Communications at Thomson Reuters
