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Author: Aidan Tynan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2020-06-18
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 1474443370
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.
Author: Aidan Tynan
Publisher: Crosscurrents
Published: 2022-05-31
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9781474443364
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.
Author: Michael Welland
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2014-09-15
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1780233892
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFrom endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. Covering a quarter of the earth’s land mass and providing a home to half a billion people, they are both a physical reality and landscapes of the mind. The idea of the desert has long captured Western imagination, put on display in films and literature, but these portrayals often fail to capture the true scope and diversity of the people living there. Bridging the scientific and cultural gaps between perception and reality, The Desert celebrates our fascination with these arid lands and their inhabitants, as well as their importance both throughout history and in the world today. Covering an immense geographical range, Michael Welland wanders from the Sahara to the Atacama, depicting the often bizarre adaptations of plants and animals to these hostile environments. He also looks at these seemingly infertile landscapes in the context of their place in history—as the birthplaces not only of critical evolutionary adaptations, civilizations, and social progress, but also of ideologies. Telling the stories of the diverse peoples who call the desert home, he describes how people have survived there, their contributions to agricultural development, and their emphasis on water and its scarcity. He also delves into the allure of deserts and how they have been used in literature and film and their influence on fashion, art, and architecture. As Welland reveals, deserts may be difficult to define, but they play an active role in the evolution of our global climate and society at large, and their future is of the utmost importance. Entertaining, informative, and surprising, The Desert is an intriguing new look at these seemingly harsh and inhospitable landscapes.
Author: Charles Bowden
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Published: 1988-04-01
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9780816510818
DOWNLOAD EBOOKContains essays that depict and decry the rapid growth and disappearing natural landscapes of the Sunbelt
Author: Celina Osuna
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-06-28
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1040044689
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStoried Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.
Author: Sushila Shekhawat
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2023-09-29
Total Pages: 208
ISBN-13: 100093733X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEmbracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China, Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability, tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history. This volume includes literary exploration of environmental injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation, falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist practices linked to various social and economic stressors and gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that help us imagine a sustainable way of life.
Author: Angelo Monaco
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2024-10-21
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13: 1040157661
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWater Stories in the Anthropocene explores how climate change has emerged as a major theme in our daily lives as it poses a myriad of economic, scientific, political and cultural challenges in the age of the Anthropocene. In all its forms and manifestations, climate change is primarily a water crisis. Water scarcity, droughts, floods, deluge, rising sea levels, ice melting, wetlands loss and sea pollution are among the main threats posed by climate change, wreaking havoc on both human and nonhuman forms of life. This book engages with instances of extreme events related to water (droughts, floods, deluges) and the impact of climate change on some waterbodies (seas and wetlands) in contemporary Anglophone novels. By taking into account a corpus of novels ranging from the various areas of the Anglophone world, and thus shuttling between the Global North and the Global South, the book reads these novels as "water stories." This volume pays attention to the pervasive presence of water in all aspects of our lives, thus showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis. Alternating between an econarratological perspective, reflections on the Anthropocene and the human/nonhuman imbrications within the blue humanities, the book contributes significantly to the considerations of the imaginative possibilities of these water stories, showing how narratives can offer insightful accounts of the present water crisis.
Author: Margarida Cadima
Publisher: Anthem Press
Published: 2023-07-11
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 1839988444
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAmerican novelist Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is best known today for her tales of the city and the experiences of patrician New Yorkers in the “Gilded Age.” This book pushes against the grain of critical orthodoxy by prioritizing other “species of spaces” in Wharton’s work. For example, how do Wharton’s narratives represent the organic profusion of external nature? Does the current scholarly fascination with the environmental humanities reveal previously unexamined or overlooked facets of Wharton’s craft? I propose that what is most striking about her narrative practice is how she utilizes, adapts, and translates pastoral tropes, conventions, and concerns to twentieth-century American actualities. It is no accident that Wharton portrays characters returning to, or exploring, various natural localities, such as private gardens, public parks, chic mountain resorts, monumental ruins, or country-estate “follies.” Such encounters and adventures prompt us to imagine new relationships with various geographies and the lifeforms that can be found there. The book addresses a knowledge gap in Wharton and the environmental humanities, especially recent debates in ecocriticism. The excavation of Wharton's words and the background of her narratives with an eye to offering an ecocritical reading of her work is what the book focuses on.
Author: Hein van Dongen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2014-03-26
Total Pages: 185
ISBN-13: 144385865X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScientists rarely take ‘paranormal experiences’ seriously. Furthermore, in the recent past the concept of the ‘paranormal’ did not even exist in philosophy. William James, who extensively studied mediumistic phenomena, labelled them ‘wild beasts of the philosophical desert’. This book demonstrates that to important philosophers – from Kant to Derrida – controversial phenomena like telepathy and clairvoyance were serious topics. The authors of this collection have studied relevant texts that have hitherto received little attention, and illustrate how each of the philosophers in question thoughtfully interpreted exceptional experiences that seem to go beyond our understanding.
Author: Josef Pieper
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-08-08
Total Pages: 132
ISBN-13: 1681492555
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is an engagement between a great modern philosopher defending classical philosophy against an army of challengers to the very notion of philosophy as classically conceived. It is written very much in the spirit of the scholastic disputations in the medieval universities, which produced the great Summas: a mutual search for truth, a philosophical laboratory, a careful winnowing of each objection. Such objectivity is lamentably rare in contemporary philosophy. In order to combat modern misunderstandings of challenges to the classical concept of philosophy, Pieper shows us the unique and uniquely valuable thing philosophy is as conceived by his masters: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and above all, Aquinas. Along this path he scatters gems of insight, such as: art and religion as Philosophy's defenders; the relationship between philosophy and science; philosophy as "seeing and saying"; and philosophy as rooted in meditation and loving contemplation. Pieper emphasizes that philosophy is something all human beings do, and should be the better for doing.
