The Political Climate: Ecocriticism and the Apocalyptic Tone

The tendency today to frame academic projects as political interventions risks limiting our political horizons if it treats our responsibilities as something that can be settled in theory. I read Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement together with John Guillory’s Professing Criticism because they offer two conflicting narrative contextualizations of the present turn to ecocriticism and “new materialism”—as a result of external, ecological or internal, academic forces. Both attempts at circumscription founder on the undecidable relations of politics and textuality. I turn to Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing to reconfigure the hinge of literature and politics.