Amitav Ghosh, the cosmopolitan Indian literary critic, pronounces his judgment on new literary trends, especially in regard to ''climate-affected fiction'' (his coinage) and his distaste for ''hypenated'' literary terms like sci-fi and cli-fi

UPDATE: SEE COMMENT SECTION BELOW:  Lexi said...

''How frustrating! And truly, I think i do believe there needs to be (and quickly, for cataloging and metadata) a universally accepted searchable label for the genre. I'm sure Mr. Ghosh's publishers would appreciate that too! ''

Amitav Ghosh TWEETED on July 15 during a public roundable sponsored by his publisher in India, PeguinIndia, which had just published his new essay book about climate change and why humans are not doing much to stop, a book he has titled "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable" which is really an important and brilliant analysis, except for a few minor omissions and slip-ups. See Nitin Sethi's savvy analysis of the book here:

http://northwardho.blogspot.tw/2016/07/the-most-important-review-of-amitav.html

During the PenguinIndia Tweet event hosted by Dr Ghosh, onlookers were invited to send in questions to the three experts on the panel, Dr Ghosh in India and Adam Sobel and Deepti Singh in Manhattan.  It was a spirited and fascinating 90 minutes Twitter discussion, with only a few sour notes.

 

The ''Twitter brouhaha'' started off like innocently and politely like this:

 

Twitter India ‏                          

Twitter India Retweeted Amitav Ghosh

Tweet your climate Qs to @GhoshAmitav & his panel of climate experts as they talk about #ClimateAndYou

 

So nn Indian woman Priyanka RoyBanerjee, tweeted a question to me and Dr Ghosh in the public chatroom. saying, after I had sent in a question to Dr Ghosh asking him very politely, since I  know that he used the cli-fi term in his term book, and remembering that in 2014 he answered an email query I had sent him about his view of the cli-fi term in which he said: "Dan, I think the cli-fi term is useful for some Western fiction." So since his editor in Chicago told me the other day that Ghosh talks about cli-fi novels in his new book, and uses the term, and since the 2014 email made it sound as if Dr Ghosh was okay with the term and felt it was useful in some cases, I asked him: "Will your next novel, or next next novel, be a cli-fi novel?"

 

[Dr Ghosh elected not to answer my question, which I was told by PenguinIndia show runners I could submit as part of the Twitter event. He never answered that question during the entire 90 minute event and never explained why he ignored the submitted question.] 

 

Then Priyanka RoyBanerjee saw my question since it was printed online for all in the Twitter event to see, and she tweeted: "Wasn't ''The Hungry Tide'' [an earlier novel of his] cli-fi to an extent with the state of Gangetic Dolphins?

 

I replied to Ms RoyBannerjee: ''Yes but Ghosh never uses the term and I am just curious why is afraid to use [cli-fi in public or here in Twitter today during this event]. Yes, 'Hungry Tide' was [cli-fi'] [I wish he would explain himself here.]

 

Dr Ghosh's response to my response to Ms Roybannerjee was to quip:  ''I think 'climate-attentive fiction' won't be taken seriously while it's a hyphenated genre.''

Professor Adam Sobel at Columbia, one of the three experts at the event, stood up to Dr Ghosh and spoke up tweeting a comment in reply to Ghosh's negative quip that
 [''I think 'climate-attentive fiction' won't be taken seriously while it's a hyphenated genre.'']

Adam Sobel tweeted:  ''Maybe so, but I still am excited about how much of it [cli-fi] is coming out now [in the US and UK].''

After I asked Ghosh in a subseqent tweet to him what he had against literary terms that contained a hyphen, such as sci-fi [or cli-fi], he answered like a Brooklyn comedian: ''And what after that? cyclone-fi? Heat-wave fi?''
          

 

And THAT WAS THE END OF THE DISCUSSION WITH DR GHOSH!!!!!

 

Later,. an onlooker in the France, Yann Rousselot, ‏TWEETED after reading Ghosh's silly tweets:                          

''Lit Snobbery is the norm it seems... But I think the tide is changing, genre is the new lit, Ghosh just hasn't noticed ^^''