The Plastic Turn

The Plastic Turn offers a novel way of looking at plastic as the defining material of our age and at the plasticity of plastic as an innovative means of understanding the arts and literature. Ranjan Ghosh terms this approach the material-aesthetic and, through this concept, traces the emergence and development of plastic polymers along the same historical trajectory as literary modernism. Plastic's growth as a product in the culture industry, its formation through multiple application and chemical syntheses, and its circulation via oceanic movements, Ghosh argues, correspond with, and offers novel insights into, developments in modernist literature and critical theory.

Through innovative readings of canonical modernist texts, analyses of art works, and accounts of plastic's devastating environmental impact, The Plastic Turn proposes plastic's unique properties and destructive ubiquity as a "theory machine" to explain literature and life in the Anthropocene. Introducing several new concepts (like plastic literature, plastic literary, etc.) into critical-humanist discourse, Ghosh enmeshes literature and theory, materiality and philosophy, history and ecology, to explore why plastic as a substance and as an idea intrigues, disturbs, and haunts us.

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English at the University of North Bengal. He is completing a trilogy on plastic. His second book on plastic, Plastic Figures, is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Find him online at ranjanghosh.in.

Ghosh's project performs its own plasticity. The Plastic Turn is itself highly additive, accumulative, malleable, and plastic, especially when Ghosh turns to listing plastic's many properties that both build and expand upon the previous... this book offers a vital contribution to materialist scholarship within both the environmental humanities and contemporary poetics.

Ghosh thoroughly considers the roles and impacts of plastics, primarily as metaphor and figuration, to craft an eye-opening look at a past, present, and future characterized by plastic thinking. His book explores plastic as both a material and a metaphor, considering the ways that plastic has become entangled, intentionally or not, with human lives and thinking.

Like a plastic bomb, Ghosh's text explodes. The remnants, the structure that survives this gestative explosion, is a confetto of nomadic polymers, hailing us to see them, follow them everywhere. With propulsive prose seemingly charged by an indefatigable, feverish energy, Ghosh's book is rich and complex, offering a vertiginous kaleidoscope of reflections on "plastic" that moves breathlessly—a churning worthy of the moniker of material aesthetic theory machine—from micro to macro, molecular to molar, and seemingly everywhere beyond and between.

Ranjan Ghosh's The Plastic Turn is the first in a trilogy intended to theorize the aims, scope and effects of a 'plastic Humanities.'

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.

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.

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

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.

Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, author of Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing:

Plasticity finds here its genuine destiny. It appears not as a metaphor but as the origin of metaphoricity, not as play on form but as the very heart of materiality, not as a structure but as a critical paradigm. Ranjan Ghosh succeeds in bringing to light the specific ontological characteristic of our epoch: the priority of fashioning over being.

Sianne Ngai, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English, University of Chicago:

Thinking with and through plastic, a material and metaphor no one on this planet can get away from, Ranjan Ghosh's book triangulates the material, the aesthetic, and the theoretical in remarkably inventive ways while never losing its conceptual precision. An eye-opening book.

Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, Irvine:

In this extraordinary work, Ranjan Ghosh presents us with a dystopic plastic future that is both omnipresent—found literally everywhere—and durable beyond the most ambitious human measure of time. The Plastic Turn engages the urgency of our thinking as a critical ontology whose consequences can only shake our most common assumptions about art and technology, life and death (or non-life). It is an amazing tour de force that will be a subject of enduring discussion and controversy.

Daniel T. O'Hara, Temple University, author of Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime:

The Plastic Turn is a major book in critical theory that advances the discussion of plasticity as a new way of being and will be influential for years to come in critical theory, literary studies, and philosophy.