The Plastic Turn

Ghosh uses plastic metaphorically and in an innovative way to advance understanding of literature, art, and life in the present. In so doing, he develops a new material aesthetic, one that offers a new way to view history, ontology, and ecology as well as literature and the arts.

* Choice *

Ecocriticism's ongoing heterogenization mirrors broader strides in the environmental humanities, including advances in green postcolonial analysis, ice humanities, plant studies, waste studies, and related ecohumanistic domains. As a case in point, a significant contribution to ecocritical examinations of waste is Ranjan Ghosh's The Plastic Turn. Through a material-aesthetic optic, Ghosh genealogizes the impact of the plastic polymer on critical theory and literary modernism

* The Year's Work in Critical & Cultural Theory *

An original and worthwhile reading experience for all those concerned with the humanities, the Anthropocene, the written word and the ecology of good and bad ideas. Ghosh's The Plastic Turn not only breaks the mold of literary criticism but asks others to refashion critical literature in elastic, versatile and plastic ways.

* LSE Review of Books *

Ranjan Ghosh's The Plastic Turn joins a clutch of books and essay collections that consider plastic well beyond its material forms to become a conceptual matter-even a dimension-that has changed the way we live, think, relate to others, and imagine otherness itself.

* Critical Inquiry *