Nathan K. Hensley — Action without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse - with Rabih Alameddine

What does it feel like to live helplessly in a world that is coming undone? Nathan Hensley turns to Victorian literature to uncover a prehistory of this deeply contemporary sense of powerlessness. For many in nineteenth-century Britain, their world seemed so scarred by human rapacity that restoring it seemed beyond the powers of any one individual. Like George Eliot's characters in Middlemarch or the doomed lovers of Wuthering Heights, observers of the gathering carbon economy felt themselves ensnared by interlocked and broken systems. In the face of damage so vast and apparently irreversible, what could possibly be done?To answer this question, Hensley shows that nineteenth-century writers and artists devised new ways to understand action--and hope. They rescaled action away from the grandly heroic and toward minor adjustments and collaborative interventions. They turned away from logical proofs and direct argumentation and instead called on aesthetic technologies like sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches, and vast, multiplot novels, finding scope for action not at the level of the theme or the thesis but in gestures and details. Ranging from J. M. W. Turner's painterly technique to Emily Brontë's dreamlike fragments (and reading along the way works by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, H. G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Berryman, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Christina Rossetti), Hensley's study makes an important contribution to Victorian studies and the environmental humanities.PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226838069?ic_referral=RPUhJp6TXeENGRFnCBOicU2QVBIA_lV3mb880PLWpKQwMzB6pV-LVTj6RDZn8J-6Q2-S6MyXVMtb-iRATM70b0xvLXtiIUH0DBmigD-5HZJfDmIp0LJ5wQ4BHSOJXL4EriWUGM8Nathan K. Hensley is associate professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty and coeditor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire. He was born in Fresno, California and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.Hensley is in conversation with Rabih Alameddine. Alameddine is the author of six critically acclaimed novels, most recently The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Press, 2021), winner of the Pen/Faulkner Prize in 2022. He is also the author of The Angel of History (Grove Press, 2016), winner of the Lambda Literary Award 2017; An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2014), a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Hakawati (Knopf, 2008); I, The Divine (W.W. Norton, 2001); Koolaids (Picador, 1999); and a collection of short stories, The Perv (Picador, 1999). His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Harold Washington Literary Award in 2018, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in 2019, the 2021 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and recently, a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He was previously the Lannan Medical Humanities Scholar-In-Residence at Georgetown University and the Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at University of Virginia. Alameddine is currently the Lannan Foundation Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.*recorded 4/27/2025