1. So I have some thoughts on Jonathan Franzen, climate change, The New Yorker, the Protestant and transcendentalist roots of American individualism, Fredric Jameson, E.B. White, and a few other things. Maybe Jack Kirby.
-
-
7. That individualism has a lot to recommend to it (and has strong affinities with the, gasp, the bourgeois mimetic novel) but it also stunts Franzen's political imagination and limits his ability to even conceive of collective solutions to climate.
Show this thread -
8. In The Corrections, Franzen has a funny bit where a character sells his Fredric Jameson books in order to go on spending spree with his girlfriend: "Fred Jameson didn't have Julia’s artful tongue." But Jameson has a pertinent critique of Franzen's failure of imagination.
Show this thread -
9. Jameson: "it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism." That's exactly Frazen's condition. His current New Yorker piece ends with a fantasy that falls squarely in the genre of the cozy catastrophe, where apocalypse revives small town life.pic.twitter.com/3vyqEymU6v
Show this thread -
10. "Cozy catastrophe" is a term Brian Aldiss coined to describe John Wyndham novels: "The essence of cosy catastrophe is that the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off."
Show this thread -
11. We really don't have the luxury for fantasies of a cozy catastrophe, where global ecological collapse will return us to the comforts of small farm life and local democracy and Thoreauvian reveries over warblers. There's a world to save.
Show this thread -
12. I have some more thoughts here on where Jonathan Franzen is coming from and why he's wrong. https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-jonathan-franzen/ …
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.