|
"Ecocriticsim is the study of literature and the environment from an interdisciplinary point of view, coming together to analyze the environment and determine possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. The discipline was heralded by publication of The Ecocrticism Reader (U Georgia, 1996) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (Harvard, 1995). Recently, all kinds of "texts" have been subjected to ecocritical methods (film, TV, scientific narrative, and architecture as well as nature writing and Romantic poetry) and questions about place (see our Getting Back into Place, 2nd ed., 2009), materialism (agency, process, and relationship), grounding in the natural sciences, and philosophical precision have defined the movement. This edited volume aims to bring ecocriticism closer to the material turn. The essays collected here focus on material entanglements, the agency of things, processes, and making meaning out of matter and things. It is an effective an broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and human expression about the world to which we are intimately connected. Boith Iovino and Opperman are well know as ecocrtical theorists. They have collected essays from many of the stars in the discipline and this volume should set a new benchmark for the field"-- 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 Storied matter / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen -- Stories come to matter / Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann -- From ecological postmodernism to material ecocriticism : creative materiality and narrative agency / Serpil Oppermann -- Limits of agency : notes on the material turn from a systems-theoretical perspective / Hannes Bergthaller -- Creative matter and creative mind : cultural econology and literary creativity / Hubert Zapf -- Natural play, natural metaphor, and natural stories : biosemiotic realism / Wendy Wheeler -- The ecology of colors : Goethe's materialist optics and ecological posthumanism / Heather I. Sullivan -- Bodies of Naples : stories, matter, and the landscapes of porosity / Serenella Iovino -- When it rains / Lowell Duckert -- Painful material realities, tragedy, ecophobia / Simon C. Estok -- Semiotization of matter : a hybrid zone between biosemiotics and material ecocriticsm / Timo Maran -- Pro/polis : three forays into the political lives of bees / Catriona Sandilands -- Excremental ecocriticism and the global sanitation crisis / Dana Phillips -- Oceanic origins, plastic activism, and new materialism at sea / Stacy Alaimo -- Meditations on natural worlds, disabled bodies, and a politics of cure / Eli Clare -- Corporeal fieldwork and risky art : Peter Goin and the making of Nuclear landscapes / Cheryll Glotfelty -- Of material sympathies, Paraclesus, and Whitman / Jane Bennett -- Source of life : Avatar, Amazonia, and an ecology of selves / Joni Adamson -- The liminal space between things : epiphany and the physical / Timothy Morton -- Spirits that matter : pathways toward a rematerialization of religion and spirituality / Kate Rigby -- Mindful new materialisms : Buddhist roots for material ecocriticsm's flourishing / Greta Gaard -- The commonwealth of breath / David Abram
|
