Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time by Barbara Leckie (review)

Reviewed by: Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time by Barbara Leckie Tobias Wilson-Bates LECKIE, BARBARA. Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2022. 274 pp. $90.00 hardcover; $30.00 paperback; $16.50 e-book (Kindle). Barbara Leckie's new monograph Climate Change, Interrupted (2022) arrives in a moment of crisis, both for the humanities and for the world ecosystem that supports the current form of human life more globally. Indeed, this fact is the obsessive, boiling center of Climate Change, Interrupted, which poses the questions of "what have we provoked?", [End Page 345] "what is wrong with us?", "are we knowingly causing a mass extinction?", and "are we evil?" (150–51). The "we" Leckie returns to throughout the text is often an avatar derived from Leckie's own experience of attending Ottawa's "Climate Emergency Camp" where local environmental groups occupied space in temperatures as extreme as -30°C as a form of protest. While sharing tea and supplies with the activists, Leckie was invited to come in and join them in their tent. Her decision to remain outside of the tent becomes one of the overarching metaphors for missing out on full participation in activism. The book, then, constitutes a reflection on whether Climate Change, Interrupted can theorize and even perform a conceptual shift from token engagement with ecological criticism to a form of composition as praxis. Can we, Leckie might say, write ourselves inside the tent? Questions such as these form the spine of what Leckie identifies as a discursive moment defined by a debilitating panic that appears to short-circuit the very activity it is meant to motivate. Leckie responds to this conceptual quagmire by invoking Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940) and its infamous "Angelus Novus" who sees history as "one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage" (9). She describes Benjamin's caricature as positing a moment of brief exteriority to the temporal activity of history, and, as such, a possible location for non-panicked collective thought and action. This challenge, for Leckie, introduces "many alternatives to teleological and linear form: montage, quotation, layering, constellation, superimposition, and interruption" (9). She gathers these modes into the central temporal proposition of the book, "post-time," an expansive term that encompasses Leckie's attempts to think about "multiple and discordant temporalities together…a word for thinking about what I cannot do in language: that is, thinking outside of or after time" (32). While the discussion of post-time emerges from considering postal temporality in George Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Climate Change, Interrupted largely departs from a traditional academic monograph. Leckie chooses to formally and stylistically challenge the disciplinary form of her own work in breaking the fourth wall and normative monograph frameworks in a series of experiments. "My purpose," she writes, "is to reframe the frame itself" (84). I must pause briefly to discuss how this creates difficulty for the academic reviewer (me, in this case). Arriving at the scene of Leckie's new monograph is not so much meeting a text to review as it is encountering a reviewer already busily at work. She revises, regrets, rewinds, and reworks herself alongside an array of fields, concepts, and memories. Reviews tend to taxonomize the usable features of a book, classifying it in ways that will impact its readership. But this book is not readily available for such a classification because it rejects many of the tendencies and features that generally accommodate such a review. Instead Leckie seems determined to develop an interior/exterior authorial voice that self-reviews in the act of writing at the levels of individual, profession, and global humanity. The book—while gripped with the imperative of being useful—does not make itself so in the traditional academic sense. To the degree that it possesses a thesis to center its gravity, it is more of a roving thematic swirling around Leckie's concept of post-time and interruption. The various sections not only do not overtly participate in recognizable critical subfields, but they also materially differ in their staging on the page. Part One pivots into an experiential...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.