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.