Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny

Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny
Author: Rod Giblett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2019-04-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0429578768

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Sigmund Freud’s essay 'The Uncanny' is celebrating a century since publication. It is arguably his greatest and most fruitful contribution to the study of culture and the environment. Environmental Humanities and the Uncanny brings into the open neglected aspects of the uncanny in this famous essay in its centenary year and in the work of those before and after him, such as Friedrich Schelling, Walter Benjamin, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Bram Stoker. This book does so by focussing on religion, especially at a time and for a world in which some sectors of the monotheisms are in aggressive, and sometimes violent, contention against those of other monotheisms, and even against other sectors within their own monotheism. The chapter on Schelling’s uncanny argues that monotheisms come out of polytheism and makes the plea for polytheism central to the whole book. It enables rethinking the relationships between mythology and monotheistic and polytheistic religions in a culturally and politically liberatory and progressive way. Succeeding chapters consider the uncanny cyborg, the uncanny and the fictional, and the uncanny and the Commonwealth, concluding with a chapter on Taoism as a polytheistic religion. Building on the author’s previous work in Environmental Humanities and Theologies in bringing together theories of religion and the environment, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, ecocultural studies and religion.

The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities

The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities
Author: Jeffrey Cohen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2021-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1009037463

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This Companion offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary movement that responds to a world reconfigured by climate change and its effects, from environmental racism and global migration to resource impoverishment and the importance of the nonhuman world. It addresses the twenty-first century recognition of an environmental crisis – its antecedents, current forms, and future trajectories – as well as possible responses to it. This books foregrounds scholarship from different periods, fields, and global locations, but it is organized to give readers a working context for the foundational debates. Each chapter examines a key topic or theme in Environmental Humanities, shows why that topic emerged as a category of study, explores the different approaches to the topics, suggests future avenues of inquiry, and considers the topic's global implications, especially those that involve environmental justice issues.

Madness in the Woods: Representations of the Ecological Uncanny

Madness in the Woods: Representations of the Ecological Uncanny
Author: Tina-Karen Pusse
Publisher: Studies in Literature, Culture, and the Environment / Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Umwelt
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Ecocriticism
ISBN: 9783631793398

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The eco-psychopathologies presented in these essays range from medieval literature to contemporary film. The romantic or gothic trope of getting lost in the forest, but also its recreational function (forest-bathing) reflect mental states humans develop when they step into the woodland.

Environmental Humanities on the Brink

Environmental Humanities on the Brink
Author: Vincent Bruyere
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1503636798

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In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid spectacularly negative future projections of environmental collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls, shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues. Each chapter places a vanitas motif—canvas, debris, toxics, paper, ark, meat, and light—in conversation with stories and images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat. Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory, this book argues we ought to keep reading, even by the flickering light of extinction.

Environmental Humanities and Theologies

Environmental Humanities and Theologies
Author: Rod Giblett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2018-06-13
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 1351124080

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Many ways of thinking about and living with ‘the environment’ have their roots in the Bible and the Christian cultural tradition. Environmental Humanities and Theologies shows that some of these ways are problematic. It also provides alternative ways that value both materiality and spirituality. Beginning with an environmentally friendly reading of the biblical story of creation, Environmental Humanities and Theologies goes on to discuss in succeeding chapters the environmental theology of wetlands, dragons and watery monsters (including crocodiles and alligators) in the Bible and literature. It then gives a critical reading of the environmental theology of the biblical book of Psalms. Theological concepts are found in the works of English writers of detective and devotional stories and novels, American nature writers and European Jewish writers (as succeeding chapters show). Environmental Humanities and Theologies concludes with an appreciation for Australian Aboriginal spirituality in the swamp serpent. It argues for the sacrality of marsh monsters and swamp serpents as figures of reverence and respect for living bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregions of the living earth in the Symbiocene. This is the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Environmental Humanities and Theologies is aimed at those who have little or no knowledge of how theology underlies much thinking and writing about ‘the environment’ and who are looking for ways of thinking about, being and living with the earth that respect and value both spirituality and materiality. It is a new text nurturing sacrality for the Symbiocene.

On Active Grounds

On Active Grounds
Author: Robert Boschman
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2019-04-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1771123419

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On Active Grounds considers the themes of agency and time through the burgeoning, interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities. Fourteen essays and a photo album cover topics such as environmental practices and history, temporal literacy, graphic novels, ecocinema, ecomusicology, animal studies, Indigeneity, wolf reintroduction, environmental history, green conservatism, and social-ecological systems change. The book also speaks to the growing concern regarding environmental issues in the aftermath of the 2015 Paris Climate Conference (COP21) and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. This collection is organized as a written and visual appeal to issues such as time (how much is left?) and agency (who is active? what can be done? what does and does not work?). It describes problems and suggests solutions. On Active Grounds is unique in its explicit and twinned emphasis on time and agency in the context of the Environmental Humanities and a requisite interdisciplinarity.

Affective Ecocriticism

Affective Ecocriticism
Author: Kyle Bladow
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496206797

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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.

Psychoanalytic Ecology

Psychoanalytic Ecology
Author: Rod Giblett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2019-02-25
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0429576641

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Psychoanalytic Ecology applies Freudian concepts, beginning with the uncanny, to environmental issues, such as wetlands and their loss, to alligators and crocodiles as inhabitants of wetlands, and to the urban underside. It also applies other Freudian concepts, such as sublimation, symptom, mourning and melancholia, to environmental issues and concerns. Mourning and melancholia can be experienced in relation to wetlands and to their loss. The city is a symptom of the will to fill or drain wetlands. This book engages in a talking cure of psychogeopathology (environmental psychopathology; mental land illness; environ-mental illness) manifested also in industries, such as mining and pastoralism, that practice greed and gluttony. Psychoanalytic Ecology promotes gratitude for generosity as a way of nurturing environ-mental health to prevent the manifestation of these psychogeopathological symptoms in the first place. Melanie Klein’s work on anal sadism is applied to mining and Karl Abraham’s work on oral sadism to pastoralism. Finally, Margaret Mahler’s and Jessica Benjamin’s work on psycho-symbiosis is drawn on to nurture bio- and psycho-symbiotic livelihoods in bioregional home habitats of the living earth in the symbiocene, the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Psychoanalytic Ecology demonstrates the power of psychoanalytic concepts and the pertinence of the work of several psychoanalytic thinkers for analysing a range of environmental issues and concerns. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental psychology, psychoanalysis and the environmental humanities.

Dark Ecology

Dark Ecology
Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231541368

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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.