A reading of Blanchot's idea of the disaster in relation to contemporary fiction of the United Kingdom and IrelandA comprehensive examination of a central, but undefined, aspect of Maurice Blanchot's deeply influential thought, the disasterSustains an argument for the importance of fiction for representing and comprehending catastrophic eventsExamines the complex relation between philosophy and fiction, suggesting a deeply reciprocal relation between artistic and philosophical responses to the disasterBlanchot, 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, Jeannette 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.
