Download or read book Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis written by Patrick D. Murphy and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-08-20 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis continues Patrick D. Murphy's focus on transversal ecocritical praxis by considering literature and cinema in terms of the persuasive force of aesthetic activity and whether or not artistic production and its criticism can be considered forms of activism. Murphy argues that literature and other forms of aesthetic production hold out the promise of being able to move some individuals deeply through both affective and intellectual engagement in ways that facilitate ideological reflection. To analyze aesthetic production ecocritically requires a transversal orientation in order to work continuously at accommodating a vast array of often seemingly disparate perspectives, disciplines, and contextual information, as well as the ever changing thematic, plot, setting, and contextual elements of the aesthetic works under consideration and the responses of changing audiences through time and across cultures. Murphy demonstrates this approach through presenting theories of transversality and applying them with attention to issues of propaganda, agitation, and persuasion, both in terms of artistic production and the criticism of such production. He also brings an ecofeminist orientation to the fore with particular attention to the gendered economic aspects of environmental issues in an age of land grabs and plantation economies. Along the way he treats a wide range of literary works, films and miniseries. In American literature he discusses realist and science fiction works, from Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours to Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior to Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, and Ana Castillo's So Far from God to Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes. In international literature, he analyzes Mo Yan's The Garlic Ballads, Jiang Rong's Wolft Totem, Michiko Ishimure's The Lake of Heaven, Miyuki Miyabe's All She Was Worth, and other novels. The book concludes with a reading of Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging, an Afterword recommending further directions for transversal ecocritical research an and interview that discusses Murphy's previous book, Transversal Ecocritical Praxis, and provides some personal background on the author.

Download or read book Ishimure Michiko s Writing in Ecocritical Perspective written by Bruce Allen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of ecocritical essays is focused on the work of Japan’s foremost writer on environment and culture, Ishimure Michiko. Ishimure is known for her pioneering trilogy that exposed the Minamata Disease incident and the nature of modern industrial pollution. She is also regarded by many critics as Japan’s most original and important literary writer. Ishimure has written over 50 volumes in a wide range of genres, including novels, Noh drama, poetry, children’s stories, essays, and mixed-genre writing. This collection brings together the work of scholars from Japan, the U.S., and Canada who are authorities on Ishimure’s writing. Contributors discuss Ishimure’s writing in the context of the latest issues in ecocritical theory, arguing for an expanded, more-than-Western understanding of literature, theory, and environmental responsibility. It will help to relate various environmental, cultural, and ecocritical issues, ranging from the events at Minamata to those at Fukushima, and consider how they point to future developments.

Download or read book Indian Feminist Ecocriticism written by Douglas A. Vakoch and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-08-08 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following Françoise d’Eaubonne’s creation of the term “ecofeminism” in 1974, scholars around the world have explored ways that the degradation of the environment and the subjugation of women are linked. In the nearly three decades since the publication of the classical work Ecofeminism by Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva in 1993, several collections have appeared that apply ecofeminism to literary criticism, also known as feminist ecocriticism. The most recent of these include anthologies that emphasize international perspectives, furthering the comparative task launched by Mies and Shiva. To date, however, there have been no books devoted to gaining a broad-based understanding of feminist ecocriticism in India, understood in its own terms. Our new volume Indian Feminist Ecocriticism offers a survey of literature as seen through an ecofeminist lens by Indian scholars, which places contemporary literary analysis through a sampling of its diverse languages and in the context of millennia-old mythic traditions of India.

Download or read book Romantic Ecocriticism written by Dewey W. Hall and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies is unique due to its rare assemblage of essays, which has not appeared within an edited collection before. Romantic Ecocriticism is distinct because the essays in the collection develop transnational and transhistorical approaches to the proto-ecological early environmental aspects in British and American Romanticism. First, the edition’s transnational approach is evident through transatlantic connections such as, but are not limited to, comparisons among the following writers: William Wordsworth, William Howitt, and Henry D. Thoreau; John Clare and Aldo Leopold; Charles Darwin and Ralph W. Emerson. Second, the transhistorical approach of RomanticEcocriticism is evident in connections among the following writers: William Wordsworth and Emily Bronte; Thomas Malthus and George Gordon Byron; James Hutton and Percy Shelley; Erasmus Darwin and Charlotte Smith; Gilbert White and Dorothy Wordsworth among others. Thus, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a dynamic collection of essays dedicated to links between scientists and literary figures interested in natural history.

Download or read book Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French written by Douglas L. Boudreau and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism is a critical approach that focuses on the representation in literature of the non-human elements of the natural world, a method of inquiry that has been largely limited to literature written in English. The aim of Ecocritical Approaches to Literature in French is twofold: to introduce ecocriticism to scholars of French-language literature, and to open ecocriticism to the vision and voices of French literature.The chapters look at work not only from France, but also from North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The discussions include fiction, poetry, film and pedagogy. The goal of the collection is to demonstrate not only the applicability of ecocritical inquiry to literature in French, but to demonstrate the possibilities of ecocritical theory on the study of French literature, and also for ecocriticism itself. This collection will be a useful resource both for scholars of French-language literature and also for ecocritics who may have had only limited contact with literatures in languages other than English.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication written by Scott Slovic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

Download or read book Extending ecocriticism written by Peter Barry and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays explores the scope for a further extension of ecocriticism across the environmental humanities. Contributors, who include both established academics and early career researchers in the humanities, were given free rein to interpret the brief. The collection is unusual in that it considers collaboration between individuals both in the same discipline and across creative disciplines. Subjects include familiar environments close to home and those such as Iceland and Antarctica, where narratives of climate, geology and ecology provide a stark backdrop to creative output. A further innovation is the inclusion of essays on public art, natural heritage interpretation and the visualisation and aesthetic impact of wind farms. The book will be of interest to writers, artists, students and researchers in the environmental humanities and those with a general interest in the cultural response to the environment.

Download or read book Eco Culture written by Robert Bell and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The edited collection, Eco Culture: Disaster, Narrative, Discourse, opens a conversation about the mediated relationship between culture and ecology. The dynamic between these two great forces comes into stark relief when a disaster—in its myriad forms and narratives—reveals the fragility of our ecological and cultural landscapes. Disasters are the clashing of culture and ecology in violent and tragic ways, and the results of each clash create profound effects to both. So much so, in fact, that the terms ecology and culture are past separation. We are far removed from their prior historical binaric connection, and they coincide through a supplementary role to each other. Ecology and culture are unified.

Download or read book Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis written by Tatiana Konrad and published by University of Nevada Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Concentrating on a powerful, emerging genre, Tatiana Konrad’s Climate Change Fiction and Ecocultural Crisis provides a survey of popular narratives that further our understanding of climate change in contemporary fiction. Konrad advocates for the expansion and redefinition of the cli-fi genre and argues that industrial fiction from the nineteenth century is the first example of climate change fiction. Tracing the ways through which cli-fi outlines a history of our modern ecocultural crisis, this book demonstrates how the genre employs four major thematic clusters to achieve this narrative: weather, science, religion, and place. Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events. The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.

Download or read book T S Eliot Poetry and Earth written by Etienne Terblanche and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-05-12 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in particular re-locate the modern reader towards mindfulness of Earth’s continuation and one’s radical becoming within that process. But what are the potential implications for ecocriticism? Based on its careful reading of the poems from a new material perspective, this book shows how vital it has become for ecocriticism to be skeptical about the extent of its skepticism, to follow instead the twentieth century’s most important poet who, at the end of searing skepticism, finds affirmation of Earth, art, and real presence.

Download or read book The Green Thread written by Patrícia Vieira and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence. The leading metaphor of the book—“the green thread”, echoing poet Dylan Thomas’ phrase “the green fuse”—carries multiple meanings. On a more apparent level, “the green thread” is what weaves together the diverse approaches of this collection: an interest in the vegetal that goes beyond single disciplines and specialist discourses, and one that not only encourages but necessitates interdisciplinary and even interspecies dialogue. On another level, “the green thread” links creative and historical productions to the materiality of the vegetal—a reality reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings. In short, The Green Thread refers to the conversations about plants that transcend strict disciplinary boundaries as well as to the possibility of dialogue with plants.

Download or read book Romantic Sustainability written by Ben P. Robertson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Sustainability is a collection of sixteen essays that examine the British Romantic era in ecocritical terms. Written by scholars from five continents, this international collection addresses the works of traditional Romantic writers such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and Samuel Coleridge but also delves into ecocritical topics related to authors added to the canon more recently, such as Elizabeth Inchbald and John Clare. The essays examine geological formations, clouds, and landscapes as well as the posthuman and the monstrous. The essays are grouped into rough categories that start with inspiration and the imagination before moving to the varied types of consumption associated with human interaction with the natural world. Subsequent essays in the volume focus on environmental destruction, monstrous creations, and apocalypse. The common theme is sustainability, as each contributor examines Romantic ideas that intersect with ecocriticism and relates literary works to questions about race, gender, religion, and identity.

Download or read book The Human Animal Boundary written by Mario Wenning and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.

Download or read book The Ecopolitics of Consumption written by H. Louise Davis and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-16 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today’s highly industrialized and technologically controlled global food systems dominate our lives, shaping our access and attitudes towards food and deeply influencing and defining our identities. At the same time, these food systems are profoundly and destructively impacting the health of the environment and threatening all of us, human and nonhuman, who must subsist in ecological conditions of increasing fragility and scarcity. This collection examines and exposes the myriad ways that the food systems, driven by global commodity capitalism and its imperative of growth at any cost, increasingly controls us and conforms us to our roles as consumers and producers. This collection covers a range of topics from the excess of consumers in the post-industrial world and the often unacknowledged yet intrinsic connection of their consumption to the growing ecological and health crises in developing nations, to topics of surveillance and control of human and nonhuman bodies through food, to the deep linkages of cultural values and norms toward food to the myriad crises we face on a global scale.

Download or read book Interdisciplinary Essays on Environment and Culture written by Luigi Manca and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of essays about the media, the environment, and the whole of humanity at the brink of extinction. As the demands of overpopulation and of an unsustainable consumer economy dry up existing natural resources and destroy vital ecosystems that we need to survive, the corporate-controlled media saturate worldwide audiences with a barrage of hypnotic images and narratives to stimulate over-consumption and to distract us from the consequences of rampant consumerism, while remaining silent about the systematic destruction of the environment and our future. Academicians from the across the sciences, the social sciences, the arts, and the humanities engage in an interdisciplinary discussion informed by a vision of an interconnected humanity and focused on the role of the media in forging public discourse. Contributors to the collection argue that today’s media are failing humanity. Rather than providing pictures of reality on which the world’s citizens can act, the corporate-controlled media are widely used as instruments of commercial and political propaganda, creating an immense web of images and narratives that their creators know to be not true–-fabrications designed to sell, to manipulate, in a sense to enslave worldwide audiences. At the core of the discussion in this book is a utopian vision of one unified humanity—billions of people whose destinies and dreams are imbricated and interdependent, and who share the same world, the same habitats. It is a vision of a world that cherishes diversity but is also united—a world where our differences are no longer a cause for conflict and where separate countries or separate ethnic or religious communities no longer have to compete or wage war to exploit available resources. As extensions of humans, the media can be instruments of salvation instead of destruction, liberation instead of oppression. But first, we must recognize the challenges we face.

Download or read book German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene written by Caroline Schaumann and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-18 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers essays on both canonical and non-canonical German-language texts and films, advancing ecocritical models for German Studies, and introducing environmental issues in German literature and film to a broader audience. This volume contextualizes the broad-ranging topics and authors in terms of the Anthropocene, beginning with Goethe and the Romantics and extending into twenty-first-century literature and film. Addressing the growing need for environmental awareness in an international humanities curriculum, this book complements ecocritical analyses emerging from North American and British studies with a specifically German Studies perspective, opening the door to a transnational understanding of how the environment plays an integral role in cultural, political, and economic issues.

Download or read book Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities written by Stephen Siperstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is an enormous and increasingly urgent issue. This important book highlights how humanities disciplines can mobilize the creative and critical power of students, teachers, and communities to confront climate change. The book is divided into four clear sections to help readers integrate climate change into the classes and topics they are already teaching as well as engage with interdisciplinary methods and techniques. Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities constitutes a map and toolkit for anyone who wishes to draw upon the strengths of literary and cultural studies to teach valuable lessons that engage with climate change.