The Procession of Identity and Ecology in Contemporary Literature

Taking Ranjan Ghosh’s provocative remark that “The earth is more a process than an object” as my starting point, I want to discuss the ways in which some contemporary literature attempts to help readers realize this awareness through the thought experiments and experiential scenarios that they relate. It is important in this regard to consider how such aesthetic texts must necessarily be not only forward thinking in their concepts but also in their imagery. Plot, character, rhetoric, style, structure all necessarily have to be engaged in order to immerse the reader in a potential reality and a reality filled with potential. In like manner, plot itself must not be Aristotelian and while we may not want a work to end on a note of irresolution, neither can we afford a resolution that wraps it all up, so that readers may remain passive spectators and trust to the heroic actions of others or technological fixes to return the world to some false impression of a secure, static state of being, rather than the flux and instability of evolutionary and anthropogenic environmental changes, which may include sudden shifts, mutations, and alterations.