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.

Plastic Turn

Trilogy on Plastic


  1. The Plastic Turn (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2022) 

Reviews
Reviews

    • 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 2023
    • 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 
    • Ghosh’s text is itself performatively plastic, both through its entangling lines of argumentation and through its stylistics, the concatenations of words and sentences joining thought-lines to the shape of a “‘plastic critical consciousness’” throughout the twentieth century (p. 16). Critical Inquiry

    1. Plastic Figures (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, forthcoming, 2025)

    1. Plastic Humanities (under preparation)


    1. Plastic Tagore: Thinking After Yesterday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)


    1. Poetry and Philosophy: A Continental Perspective ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)

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    Reviews
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    Book

    Reviews

    • This indispensable gathering of essays by some of the most compelling critics and philosophers writing today provides a comprehensive and decisive investigation of European philosophy’s engagement with its ancient and enduring adversary. These studies are admirable for the clarity and attention to detail that they bring to often difficult texts. As a result, one begins to understand in new ways the ancient paradox that without poetry philosophy would be unable to recognize itself, and in the bargain philosophy becomes for poetry an indispensable poetics of words and things of the world.                                                                                              Gerald L. Bruns, author of Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern Literature

 

  • This very exciting collection offers admirably concise and often brilliant essays on twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophers and their relationship to, reliance on, commentaries about poetry. Any student of European thinking, especially of those central strains of the ‘continental tradition’ that take their origin in phenomenology, will learn a great deal not only from the specific essays in this collection but also from the interplay between them.                                                                                             John Michael, author of Secular Lyric: The Modernization of the Poem in Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson


  1. Thinking Literature Across Continents (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller)

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Forum/Focus Essays
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Book      Full Book

Forum/Focus Essays

    • College Literature  Volume 45, Number 4, Fall 2018
      • [essays on the book by: Ankhi Mukherjee, Huda Fakhreddine, Martin Middeke, John G, Peters, Frederic Regard, Thomas Docherty, Ning Yizhong, response essays by J Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh] Johns Hopkins University Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews


  1. Presence: Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the 21st Century ed. (Ithaca, New York, London: Cornell University Press, 2013, with Ethan Kleinberg).

My Trilogy on Trans-philosophy


  1. Trans(in)fusion: Reflections on Critical Thinking (New York, Routledge, 2020)


  1. Transcutural Poetics & the Concept of the Poet from Philip Sidney to T S Eliot (New York: Routledge, 2017)  


  1. Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy, Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)


  1. A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).


  1. Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia, ed. (New York, London: Routledge, 2012).


  1. Edward Said, the Literary, Social and the Political World ed. (New York, London: Routledge  2009).


  1. Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy ed. (New York, London: Routledge, 2008, with Antonia Navarro Tejero). 


  1. (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits ed. (Lanham: New York: Oxford, University Press of America, 2006, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group). 


  1. Romancing Theory, Riding Interpretation: (In)fusion Approach, Salman Rushdie ed. (New York, Oxford: Peter Lang International Publishing, 2012). 


  1. In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2012) 

Books

Trilogy on plastic humanities:

  1. Random (ed) [under review]
  2. Plastic Tagore: Thinking After Yesterday (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023)
  3. Poetry and Philosophy: A Continental Perspective ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
  4. Thinking Literature Across Continents (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016, with J Hillis Miller)
  5. Presence: Philosophy, History and Cultural Theory for the 21st Century ed. (Ithaca, New York, London: Cornell University Press, 2013, with Ethan Kleinberg).
  6. Aesthetics, Politics, Pedagogy, Tagore: A Transcultural Philosophy of Education (London & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
  7. A Lover’s Quarrel with the Past: Romance, Representation, Reading (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).
  8. Trans(in)fusion: Reflections on Critical Thinking (New York, Routledge, 2020)
  9. Transcutural Poetics & the Concept of the Poet from Philip Sidney to T S Eliot (New York: Routledge, 2017)  
  10. Making Sense of the Secular: Critical Perspectives from Europe to Asia, ed. (New York, London: Routledge, 2012).
  11. Edward Said, the Literary, Social and the Political World ed. (New York, London: Routledge  2009).
  12. Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy ed. (New York, London: Routledge, 2008, with Antonia Navarro Tejero). 
  13. (In)fusion Approach: Theory, Contestation, Limits ed. (Lanham: New York: Oxford, University Press of America, 2006, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group). 
  14. Romancing Theory, Riding Interpretation: (In)fusion Approach, Salman Rushdie ed. (New York, Oxford: Peter Lang International Publishing, 2012). 
  15. In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2012)