Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster

Blanchot, Ecology and Contemporary Fiction: The Thought of the Disaster delves into Maurice Blanchot’s enigmatic, and deeply influential, notion of the disaster – a term Blanchot famously refuses to define. By exploring the novels of Jon McGregor, Mike McCormack, David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Gee, Jonathan Boulter suggests that we can think of literature, the space of the imagination, as the place where some conception (ethical, ecological, or ontological) of the disaster emerges. These novels, all in some ways about the disaster, just as they are inflected by the disaster, become the place where an understanding of critical events – death, ecological catastrophe, pandemics – is possible.