Elisha Cohn: ‘Realism, in Crisis’

Cohn examines temporal dislocations in realist depictions of environmental crisis, emphasizing that novelists expand what narratologists call “narrating time” by shifting among these modalities in parallel and embedded clauses, suggesting that dilation and expansion are the “mental procedures” that substantialize seemingly inaccessible scales of experience. With this narratological method, she considers two realist accounts of flood, where conditions much exacerbated by human intervention render long-term crises as immediate emergencies in which the “narrating” moment becomes especially protracted: George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004). Though written at very different moments in the history of climate crisis, these novels similarly showcase realism’s capacity to make diffuse crisis perceptible in the expanded present by inhabiting, dislocating, and reflecting upon multiple points of view—without disavowing a shared sense of history, or giving up on the hope of a shared world.