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Climate Lyricism

Climate Lyricism

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In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change. Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how literature, poetry, and essays help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change. Min Hyoung Song is Professor of English at Boston College and author of The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, both also published by Duke University Press. Introduction. The Practice of Sustaining Attention to Climate Change  1
Part I. Scope
1. What is Denial? Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Sally Wen Mao’s “Occidentalism”  19
2. Why Revive the Lyric? Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Craig Santos Perez’s “Love in a Time of Climate Change”  38
3. Why Stay with Bad Feelings? Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic and Tommy Pico’s IRL  65
4. How Should I Live? Inattention and Everyday-Life Projects  80
Part II. Breath
5. What’s Wrong with Narrative? The Promises and Disappointments of Climate Fiction  101
6. Where Are We Now? Scalar Variance, Persistence, Swing, and David Bowie  121
Part III. Urgency
7. The Scale of the Everyday, Part 1: The Keeling Curve, Frank O’Hara, and Bernadette Mayer  141
8. The Scale of the Everyday, Part 2: Ada Limón, Tommy Pico, and Solmaz Sharif  159
9. The Global Novel Imagines the Afterlife: George Saunders, J.M. Coetzee, and HanKang  180
Conclusion. The Foreign Present—Who Are We to Each Other?  201
Acknowledgments  213
Notes  217
Bibliography  233
Index  243

“Coining climate lyricism, Min Hyoung Song recuperates collective agency as a mingling of attention, perception, and responsiveness. He doesn’t skirt the despair of climate catastrophe but, rather, reckons with it to find reasons to continue. The book follows its own lyrical flow as it integrates personal reflections from pandemic lockdown with readings of literary texts informed by ecocriticism and critical race theory. Song shows that questions of racist exclusion and harm are never far from questions of environmental thriving, just as the struggles of climate crisis are never far away even when they are not explicit on the page.”
“Min Hyoung Song presents a thrilling and powerfully argued case for literature and poetry as a means of cultivating sustained attention to climate change in this tumultuous time. Using an innovative framework to draw forth the complex and multifaceted ways climate change becomes apprehensible, Climate Lyricism will undoubtedly make a significant impact on conversations in ecocriticism, contemporary literary studies, and studies of climate change.”

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in