Unsettling sustainability: the poetics of discomfort

Abstract

For all its ostensibly worthy connotations, the concept of sustainability risks perpetuating modalities of thinking which are inadequate to the profound and urgent episte-mological and ontological challenges of ecological crisis. This paper offers a critique of this concept, and suggests that literary works have a role to play in challenging some of its underlying assumptions. Drawing on the experimental poetic techniques of Maggie O’Sullivan and Allen Fisher, it proposes that in different ways their writing embodies a poetics of discomfort which productively unsettles some of the more problematic logics at work in narratives of environmental sustainability.