From Global Risk to Private Catastrophe
The Domestic and the Planetary in Daniel Kramb's From Here and Susannah Waters' Cold Comfort
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2954512 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Karsten Levihn-Kutzler (0000-0001-9203-3915, Goethe University Frankfurt, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2018-12-07 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Open Library of Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2056-6700 • E-ISSN: 2056-6700 |
| Publisher | Open Library of the Humanities (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.16995/olh.378 |
| OpenAlex | W2905572173 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
Climate change is at the heart of recent critical debates about the role of the global and the local in the critical practice of the environmental humanities. While critics like Ursula K. Heise and Timothy Clark have argued for putting the global at the conceptual centre of inquiry, others have warned that such a wide focus obscures the localized effects of climate change and their connection to histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Rather than privileging one side of this argument over the other, this paper seeks to put both perspectives into a productive dialogue that focusses on how literature can connect the local histories and global environmental risks. The paper draws on two relatively unknown novels, Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort (2007) and Daniel Kramb’s From Here (2012), in order to show how the threat of climate change disrupts understandings of scale that structure our social lives by linking global forces to moments of domestic and intimate crisis. From Here’ s protagonist is a cosmopolitan culture worker, whose perpetual uprootedness becomes the vantage point for her political engagement with the threat of climate change. Cold Comfort’s Alaska Native protagonist finds her house literally tilting due to the melting permafrost ground, while domestic violence and sexual abuse make her home uninhabitable. Despite the huge disjuncture in the contexts they portray, the texts share an interest in the disjuncture between awareness and agency, in the impact of climate change on domestic and intimate relationships, and in links between the private, the political and the planetary
Climate change · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Global warming · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Modern American Literature Studies
Climate Change and the Problem of Representation
Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet
Climate change in literature and literary criticism
Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change
Whose environment
From Global Risk to Private Catastrophe
The Climate of History
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2018 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |