The Political Climate: Ecocriticism and the Apocalyptic Tone

Abstract: 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.