Political Forms of Infinity in Contemporary Ecopoetry and Ecofiction: Why We Read in a Time of Crisis

Abstract

Why read poetry and fiction when the world is burning, drowning, and quaking? This thesis seeks to provide an answer by arguing for the political efficacy of contemporary ecopoetry and ecofiction. Instead of viewing reading as an escape from ecopolitical struggles, I show the limited but productive role of literature in a time of crisis. Read together, Juliana Spahr’s book of poetry This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (2005) and Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide (2004) illuminate the coordinates by which a viable response to the crisis must abide. The thesis centers around the question of finitude, especially how to relate to ecological limits and political forms. By drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s true infinity and Anna Kornbluh’s political formalism, I argue that we must reconceive the limits of nature not as external barriers to be overcome but as internal to any social order at all. Through a politically formalist examination of Spahr’s ecopoetry and Ghosh’s ecofiction, this thesis demonstrates the need for critiquing existing structures not to tear everything down but to imagine how future forms may be built differently.