Download or read book Ecology and Literatures in English written by Françoise Besson and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In all latitudes, writers hold out a mirror, leading the reader to awareness by telling real or imaginary stories about people of good will who try to save what can be saved, and about animals showing humans the way to follow. Such tales argue that, in spite of all destructions and tragedies, if we are just aware of, and connected to, the real world around us, to the blade of grass at our feet and the star above our heads, there is hope in a reconciliation with the Earth. This may start with the emergence, or, rather, the return, of a nonverbal language, restoring the connection between human beings and the nonhuman world, through a form of communication beyond verbalization. Through a journey in Anglophone literature, with examples taken from Aboriginal, African, American, English, Canadian and Indian works, this book shows the role played by literature in the protection of the planet. It argues that literature reveals the fundamental idea that everything is connected and that it is only when most people are aware of this connection that the world will change. Exactly as a tree is connected with all the animal life in and around it, texts show that nothing should be separated. From Shakespeare’s theatre to ecopoetics, from travel writing to detective novels, from children’s books to novels, all literary genres show that literature responds to the violence destroying lands, men and nonhuman creatures, whose voices can be heard through texts.
Download or read book Paper Minds written by Jonathan Kramnick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-09-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do poems and novels create a sense of mind? What does literary criticism say in conversation with other disciplines that addresses problems of consciousness? In Paper Minds, Jonathan Kramnick takes up these vital questions, exploring the relations between mind and environment, the literary forms that uncover such associations, and the various fields of study that work to illuminate them. Opening with a discussion of how literary scholarship’s particular methods can both complement and remain in tension with corresponding methods particular to the sciences, Paper Minds then turns to a series of sharply defined case studies. Ranging from eighteenth-century poetry and haptic theories of vision, to fiction and contemporary problems of consciousness, to landscapes in which all matter is sentient, to cognitive science and the rise of the novel, Kramnick’s essays are united by a central thematic authority. This unified approach of these essays shows us what distinctive knowledge that literary texts and literary criticism can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagements with the world.
Download or read book Cultivation and Catastrophe written by Sonya Posmentier and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- PART 1: CULTIVATION -- 1 Cultivating the New Negro: The Provision Ground in New York -- 2 Cultivating the Nation: The Reterritorialization of Black Poetry at Midcentury -- 3 Cultivating the Caribbean: "The Star-Apple Kingdom," Property, and the Plantation -- PART 2: CATASTROPHE -- 4 Continuing Catastrophe: The Flood Blues of Sterling Brown and Bessie Smith -- 5 Collecting Catastrophe: How the Hurricane Roars in Zora Neale Hurston's -- 6 Collecting Culture: Hurricane Gilbert's Lyric Archive -- Coda: Unnatural Catastrophe -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
Download or read book Victorian Literature Energy and the Ecological Imagination written by Allen MacDuffie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Victorian literature and science in tandem, Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination investigates how the concept of energy was fictionalized - both mystified and demystified - during the rise of a new resource-intensive industrial and economic order. The first extended study of a burgeoning area of critical interest of increasing importance to twenty-first-century scholarship, it anchors its investigation at the very roots of the energy problem, in a period that first articulated questions about sustainability, the limits to growth, and the implications of energy pollution for the entire global environment. With chapters on Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, Allen MacDuffie discusses the representation of urban environments in the literary imaginary, and how those texts helped reveal the gap between cultural fantasies of unbounded energy generation, and the material limits imposed by nature.
Download or read book Ecology and Literature written by B. Moore and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Feminist Ecocriticism written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After uncovering the oppressive dichotomies of male/female and nature/culture that underlie contemporary environmental problems, Feminist Ecocriticism focuses specifically on emancipatory strategies employed by ecofeminist literary critics as antidotes, asking what our lives might be like as those strategies become increasingly successful in overcoming oppression. Thus, ecofeminism is not limited to the critique of literature, but also helps identify and articulate liberatory ideals that can be actualized in the real world, in the process transforming everyday life. Providing an alternative to rugged individualism, for example, ecofeminist literature promotes a more fulfilling sense of interrelationship with both community and the land. In the process of exploring literature from ecofeminist perspectives, the book reveals strategies of emancipation that have already begun to give rise to more hopeful ecological narratives.
Download or read book Ecology and Literature written by B. Moore and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing a groundbreaking rhetorical and ecocritical approach, this volume advances personification/anthropomorphism as a means of representing the natural world and arguing for its worth outside of human use.
Download or read book Developments in Numerical Ecology written by Pierre Legendre and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From earlier ecological studies it has become apparent that simple univariate or bivariate statistics are often inappropriate, and that multivariate statistical analyses must be applied. Despite several difficulties arising from the application of multivariate methods, community ecology has acquired a mathematical framework, with three consequences: it can develop as an exact science; it can be applied operationally as a computer-assisted science to the solution of environmental problems; and it can exchange information with other disciplines using the language of mathematics. This book comprises the invited lectures, as well as working group reports, on the NATO workshop held in Roscoff (France) to improve the applicability of this new method numerical ecology to specific ecological problems.
Download or read book Ecoambiguity written by Karen Thornber and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 751 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asian literatures are famous for celebrating the beauties of nature and depicting people as intimately connected with the natural world. But in fact, because the region has a long history of transforming and exploiting nature, much of the fiction and poetry in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages portrays people as damaging everything from small woodlands to the entire planet. These texts seldom talk about environmental crises straightforwardly. Instead, like much creative writing on degraded ecosystems, they highlight what Karen Laura Thornber calls ecoambiguity—the complex, contradictory interactions between people and the nonhuman environment. Ecoambiguity is the first book in any language to analyze Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary treatments of damaged ecosystems. Thornber closely examines East Asian creative portrayals of inconsistent human attitudes, behaviors, and information concerning the environment and takes up texts by East Asians who have been translated and celebrated around the world, including Gao Xingjian, Ishimure Michiko, Jiang Rong, and Ko Un, as well as fiction and poetry by authors little known even in their homelands. Ecoambiguity addresses such environmental crises as deforesting, damming, pollution, overpopulation, species eradication, climate change, and nuclear apocalypse. This book opens new portals of inquiry in both East Asian literatures and ecocriticism (literature and environment studies), as well as in comparative and world literature.
Download or read book Green Writing written by James C. McKusick and published by MacMillan. This book was released on 2000 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the emergence of ecological understanding among the English Romantic poets, arguing that this new holistic paradigm offered a conceptual and ideological basis for American environmentalism. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, John Clare and Mary Shelley all contributed to the fundamental ideas and core values of the modern environmental movement. Their vital influence was openly acknowledged by Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir, and Mary Austin. By revealing hitherto unsuspected links between English and American nature writers, this book elucidates the Romantic origins of American environmentalism.
Download or read book Ecology Without Nature written by Timothy Morton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all. Ecology without Nature investigates our ecological assumptions in a way that is provocative and deeply engaging. Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, he explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a fresh vocabulary for reading "environmentality" in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature widens our view of ecological criticism, and deepens our understanding of ecology itself. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a radical new form of ecological criticism: "dark ecology."
Download or read book Ecology and the Literature of the British Left written by H. Gustav Klaus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Premised on the belief that a social and an ecological agenda are compatible, this collection offers readings in the ecology of left and radical writing from the Romantic period to the present. While early ecocriticism tended to elide the bitter divisions within and between societies, recent practitioners of ecofeminism, environmental justice, and social ecology have argued that the social, the economic and the environmental have to be seen as part of the same process. Taking up this challenge, the contributors trace the origins of an environmental sensibility and of the modern left to their roots in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, charting the ways in which the literary imagination responds to the political, industrial and agrarian revolutions. Topics include Samuel Taylor Coleridge's credentials as a green writer, the interaction between John Ruskin's religious and political ideas and his changing view of nature, William Morris and the Garden City movement, H. G. Wells and the Fabians, the devastated landscapes in the poetry and fiction of the First World War, and the leftist pastoral poetry of the 1930s. In historicizing and connecting environmentally sensitive literature with socialist thought, these essays explore the interactive vision of nature and society in the work of writers ranging from William Wordsworth and John Clare to John Berger and John Burnside.
Download or read book Caribbean Literature and the Environment written by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region. This book explores the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
Download or read book Postcolonial Ecologies written by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
Download or read book Literature and the Environment written by George Hart and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-07-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phrase literature and environment only achieved popularity in recent decades, yet writers dating back to the explorers of the 1500s—and later such 19th-century Romanticists as Thoreau—have long been addressing environmental issues through literary expression. This volume introduces students and educators to the field by tracing the evolution of environmental writing in the United States. Chapters written by distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on important environmental issues, guiding readers through 11 carefully selected literary works. Each chapter provides brief biographical information on the author, discussions of the work's structural, thematic, and stylistic components, and insights into the historical context that relates the work to relevant environmental issues. Each chapter concludes with information on works cited. The analyzed works cover a wide spectrum of literature and span nearly 100 years. Included are early writings, such as Mary Austin's 1903 The Land of Little Rain, and famous groundbreaking works, such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Gary Snyder's Turtle Island (1974). Also included are frequently assigned works of special interest to students, such as The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), The Earthsea Trilogy (1977), and Ceremony (1977). A list of selected further suggested readings completes the volume. Students of literature, as well as educators looking for new ways to present social issues, will find many ideas and much inspiration in this volume.
Download or read book Dark Ecology written by Timothy Morton and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.
Download or read book Local Natures Global Responsibilities written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the New Literatures in English, nature has long been a paramount issue: the environmental devastation caused by colonialism has left its legacy, with particularly disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable parts of the world. At the same time, social and cultural transformations have altered representations of nature in postcolonial cultures and literatures. It is this shift of emphasis towards the ecological that is addressed by this volume. A fast-expanding field, ecocriticism covers a wide range of theories and areas of interest, particularly the relationship between literature and other ‘texts’ and the environment. Rather than adopting a rigid agenda, the interpretations presented involve ecocritical perspectives that can be applied most fruitfully to literary and non-literary texts. Some are more general, ‘holistic’ approaches: literature and other cultural forms are a ‘living organism’, part of an intellectual ecosystem, implemented and sustained by the interactions between the natural world, both human and non-human, and its cultural representations. ‘Nature’ itself is a new interpretative category in line with other paradigms such as race, class, gender, and identity. A wide range of genres are covered, from novels or films in which nature features as the main topic or ‘protagonist’ to those with an ecocritical agenda, as in dystopian literature. Other concerns are: nature as a cultural construct; ‘gendered’ natures; and the city/country dichotomy. The texts treated challenge traditional Western dualisms (human/animal, man/nature, woman/man). While such global phenomena as media (‘old’ or ‘new’), tourism, and catastrophes permeate many of these texts, there is also a dual focus on nature as the inexplicable, elusive ‘Other’ and the need for human agency and global responsibility.
