Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.
This book offers a brief, incisive accessible overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in an age of global environmental threat.
Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies. These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness—all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.
The Plastic Turn offers a novel way of looking at plastic as the defining material of our age and at the plasticity of plastic as an innovative means of understanding the arts and literature. Ranjan Ghosh terms this approach the material-aesthetic and, through this concept, traces the emergence and development of plastic polymers along the same historical trajectory as literary modernism. Plastic's growth as a product in the culture industry, its formation through multiple application and chemical syntheses, and its circulation via oceanic movements, Ghosh argues, correspond with, and offers novel insights into, developments in modernist literature and critical theory. 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.
Over the past century, the Italian landscape has undergone exceedingly rapid transformations, shifting from a mostly rural environment to a decidedly modern world. This changing landscape is endowed with a narrative agency that transforms how we understand our surroundings. Situated at the juncture of Italian studies and ecocriticism and following the recent “material turn” in the environmental humanities, Elemental Narratives outlines an original cultural and environmental map of the bel paese. Giving equal weight to readings of fiction, nonfiction, works of visual art, and physical sites, Enrico Cesaretti investigates the interconnected stories emerging from both human creativity and the expressive eloquence of “glocal” materials, such as sulfur, petroleum, marble, steel, and asbestos, that have helped make and, simultaneously, “un-make” today’s Italy, affecting its socio-environmental health in multiple ways. Embracing the idea of a decentralized agency that is shared among human and nonhuman entities, Cesaretti suggests that engaging with these entangled discursive and material texts is a sound and revealing ecocritical practice that promises to generate new knowledge and more participatory, affective responses to environmental issues, both in Italy and elsewhere. Ultimately, he argues that complementing quantitative, data-based information with insights from fiction and nonfiction, the arts, and other humanistic disciplines is both desirable and crucial if we want to modify perceptions and attitudes, increase our awareness and understanding, and, in turn, develop more sustainable worldviews in the era of the Anthropocene. Elegantly written and convincingly argued, this book will appeal broadly to scholars and students working in the fields of environmental studies, comparative literatures, ecocriticism, environmental history, and Italian studies.
One of the more frequently lodged, serious, and justifiable complaints about ecocritical work is that it is insufficiently theorized. Ecocritical Theory puts such claims decisively to rest by offering readers a comprehensive collection of sophisticated but accessible essays that productively investigate the relationship between European theory and ecocritique. With its international roster of contributors and subjects, it also militates against the parochialism of ecocritics who work within the limited canon of the American West. Bringing together approaches and orientations based on the work of European philosophers and cultural theorists, this volume is designed to open new pathways for ecocritical theory and practice in the twenty-first century.
The book is an investigation into the ways in which ideas of place are negotiated, contested and refigured in environmental writing at the turn of the twenty-first century. It focuses on the notion of place as a way of interrogating the socio-political and environmental pressures that have been seen as negatively affecting our environments since the advent of modernity, as well as the solutions that have been given as an antidote to those pressures. Examining a selection of literary representations of place from across the globe, the book illuminates the multilayered and polyvocal ways in which literary works render local and global ecological relations of places. In this way, it problematises more traditional environmentalism and its somewhat essentialised idea of place by intersecting the largely Western discourse of environmental studies with postcolonial and Indigenous studies, thus considering the ways in which forms of emplacement can occur within displacement and dispossession, especially within societies that are dealing with the legacies of colonialism, neocolonial exploitation or international pressure to conform. As such, the work foregrounds the singular processes in which different local/global communities recognise themselves in their diverse approaches to the environment, and gestures towards an environmental politics that is based on an epistemology of contact, connection and difference, and as one, moreover, that recognises its own epistemological limits. This book will appeal to researchers working in the fields of environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies and comparative literature.
Ecocriticism has emerged as one of the most fascinating and rapidly growing fields of recent literary and cultural studies. From its regional origins in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American academia, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, which involves a decidedly transdisciplinary and transnational paradigm that promises to return a new sense of relevance to research and teaching in the humanities. A distinctive feature of the present handbook in comparison with other survey volumes is the combination of ecocriticism with cultural ecology, reflecting an emphasis on the cultural transformation of ecological processes and on the crucial role of literature, art, and other forms of cultural creativity for the evolution of societies towards sustainable futures. In state-of-the-art contributions by leading international scholars in the field, this handbook maps some of the most important developments in contemporary ecocritical thought. It introduces key theoretical concepts, issues, and directions of ecocriticism and cultural ecology and demonstrates their relevance for the analysis of texts and other cultural phenomena.
Photographer Groin presents all-too-vivid color images of sites in the US where nuclear testing has significantly altered the landscape and anything (usually not much) that still lives there. Also includes historical and official photographs of tests and their effects. An exhibit of the photographs is currently touring the country. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie
