ABSTRACT
Climate change is a phenomenon of modernity, but the technological enhancement of existence and the proliferating possibilities for the human future associated with modernness sit uneasily, at best, with the deteriorating conditions and narrowing of options for tolerable living that are anticipated for advanced climate change's regime. There is little doubt that climate change portends massive alterations to ways of living for virtually all of the earth's populations. There seems wide agreement too that the slowness of the catastrophe's unfolding has diminished the chances for the kind of concerted international action required to halt, and even perhaps to retard, its progress. The possibility of a contemporaneity of modernism in the sense just mentioned might seem precluded, in other words, by the sheer qualitative remove of catastrophe in slow motion from the "literary pursuit of 'dynamism"' that Peter Nicholls describes as "a preoccupation of almost every pre-war avant-garde movement".
