Is it Possible to Feel the Anthropocene?

Climate Change and Literary Form

Abstract

This article opens with the diatribe that Amitav Ghosh (2016) casts upon his contemporary fellow writers, sustaining that contemporary literature does not depict the ecological catastrophes caused by climate change. From this point on, the article discusses Ghosh’s statement, and also how it is contradicted by the work of Mark Bould (2021), whose book affirms that contemporary literature and arts do nothing else than reflect upon climate change in such a way that the Anthropocene is now our aesthetic unconscious. Later, the text discusses Caroline Levine’s (2023) point of view, which is based on a sort of affirmative instrumentalization of literature that aims at a humanist activism, so literary forms can respond to the climate challenges of the present. At the end, the article outlines a complementary point of view to those mentioned before, drawing attention to the material conditions in which literature is made nowadays, both concerning climate change and especially literature’s mode of production, which is affected by the new information technologies and the capitalist mode of production in its current phase. In conclusion, the article presents the idea that the problem concerning literary forms in the Anthropocene results from the actual conditions in which literature is produced and from its relation to the means by which the social life is reproduced; therefore, critical analysis of such problem should be guided by the comprehension of all the phenomena that surround it.