Entertaining Futility
Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change
978-1-62349-685-2 Paperback (with Flaps)
5.12 x 8 x 0 in
224 pp. 11 b&w photos. Bib. Index.
Pub Date: 08/06/2018
Available
McMurry believes human culture relies on a full suite of rhetorical tricks to distract us from our own demise. He investigates the role language, discourse, media, and technology play in shaping perceptions and misperceptions of our complex environmental crises. Writing in a mode that freely mixes the scholarly, fictive, poetic, and personal, McMurry draws on philosophy, history, ecology, film, science fiction, and pop culture to raise questions that are difficult to face, let alone answer. In the author’s words, “our age is utterly paralyzing unless you can crack jokes about it.”
Entertaining Futility offers no easy solutions to today’s environmental calamities and, in fact, claims that perhaps the continual proposing of solutions is part of the problem. Instead, McMurry encourages readers to examine their own deeply held beliefs about the environment and the future and to look more closely at where those beliefs originate. By pulling back the curtain, he reveals the rhetorical and cultural ruses that distract us from the reality of our environmental crises.
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Published by Texas A&M University Press