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In
Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified through literature.
List of contents
Introduction: Climate Arrhythmias
Phenological Literature and Media
1. Phenological Writing and the Composite Year
2. Repeat Photography During the Great Acceleration
Unseasonable Novels
3. Urban Phenology and Monsoon Realism
4. Climate Fiction and the Unprecedented
Rhythm and Environmental Practice
5. Occasional Poetry in Stressed Times
6. Keeping Time
Epilogue: More Habits Than Dreams
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Sarah Dimick is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University.
Summary
As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. A writer and a fisher track the distribution of beach trash in Chennai, chronicling disruptions in seasonal winds and currents along the Bay of Bengal. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific.
In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick links these accounts of shifting seasons across the globe, tracing how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how the unseasonable reverberates through environmentally privileged and environmentally precarious communities. In chapters ranging from Henry David Thoreau’s journals to Alexis Wright’s depiction of Australia’s catastrophic bushfires, from classical Tamil poetry to repeat photography, Dimick illustrates how seasonal rhythms determine what flourishes and what perishes. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when. Amid misaligned and broken rhythms, attending to the shared but disparate experience of the unseasonable can realign or sharpen solidarities within the climate crisis.
