Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 1076-0962 - ISSN (Online) 1759-1090 Published by Oxford University Press[370 journals]
Authors:Dickinson M. Abstract: The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place. By BristowTom. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 139 pp. Hardcover $67.50. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Taylor J. Abstract: An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850. By CarrollSiobhan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2015. 304 pp. Cloth $59.95. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Guzman M. Abstract: Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature. Edited by PetersheimSteven and JonesMadison P.IV. Lanham: Lexington, 2015. 254 pp. Hardcover $80.00. eBook $79.99. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Sivils M. Abstract: The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Edited by VieiraPatrícia, GaglianoMonica, and RyanJohn. Lanham: Lexington, 2016. 306 pp. Cloth $95.00. eBook $94.99. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Gifford T. Abstract: The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. By WulfAndrea. London: John Murray, 2015. 474 pp. Hardcover £25.00. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Slovic S. Abstract: Expansion and contraction. Moving ever outward, yet remembering the center, the root, home ground. Coming back to the core, to the canon, but from a new angle. And then lighting out again for new textual territory. The spirit of discovery exists in tandem and tension with adherence to an essential vocabulary of justice and ethical behavior, to deep engagement with place, with otherness and sameness, and to aesthetic responses to both physis (the physical world) and techne (human creations). Ecocriticism continues to spiral outward and inward. PubDate: 2016-11-16
Authors:Dolan K. Abstract: The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. By WrightLaura. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2015. 232 pp. Cloth $74.95. Paper $28.95. eBook $28.95. PubDate: 2016-10-22
Authors:Chang C. Abstract: Repetitive everyday activities as banal as eating bring together a tripartite tension and alliance: biological, aesthetic, and moral.22 To eat is biologically imperative, sensuously pleasurable, and at the same time gruesomely violent. In the twenty-first century, gastronomy, or eating as aesthetic praxis, which not only seeks to "hide the banal necessity and the barbaric compulsion of eating," (Coff 12) can also serve as a camouflage for neoliberalist greed. This article aims to invert the role of the aesthetics by turning to the ethical potential of aesthetics, especially in the realm of animal advocacy. In redressing the contentious relationship, I focus on eating—one of the most mundane and primitive activities and common ways of “incorporating” nonhuman animals—as an example for engaging critical gastro-aesthetics and animal ethics. I first discuss current Chinese and Western discourse on gastro-aesthetics and critical animal studies,33 and then examine prevalent cultural phenomena in contemporary food and entertainment cultures, the ones that aestheticize cruelty in both contemporary neoliberal capitalist Western and Chinese societies. I use this as a case to argue that animal voices have long been neglected in both media representation and the popular discourse of gastronomy. Here live animals are transformed into what Carol J. Adams calls the “absent referent” (66–67) in this domain of cruel gastro-aesthetics that is found in many global societies. PubDate: 2016-08-13
Authors:Jones MP; IV. Abstract: How shall I establish my words, and what part of it can be truly called a remnant of the land that then was?—CritiasThe owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.—Hegel PubDate: 2016-08-13
Authors:Gemein MN. Abstract: Political reality in so many places still operates on terms and conceptualizations determined by colonial languages and corresponding mindsets: nature, wilderness, sacrifice zone, sustainability. Social critics talk about social and political change, but a fundamental factor for such development is changing terminology to reform the status quo in Western ways of thinking. Scholars in the Environmental Humanities and Indigenous Studies are working toward a paradigm shift by exploring confluences between Western and Indigenous sciences and seeking concepts and terms that contribute to a more inclusive intellectual framework. In recent years, the concept of cosmopolitics, coined by science philosopher Isabelle Stengers, has helped to focus these efforts, and Joni Adamson’s work has been crucial for an inclusion of cosmopolitics into ecocritical discourse, especially environmental justice ecocriticism. In acknowledgment of pluralism beyond human cultures, cosmopolitics is a theoretical framework and political strategy for an expansion of political participation beyond the human realm. It integrates environmental and ecological justice with a strong focus on social interaction, which also corresponds to the philosophies guiding Indigenous movements. If the term helps scholars pinpoint and explain the common denominators of existing political strategies, it may be a useful term and concept for those in the political arena. Here, I consider where, how, and why the term could be introduced into the political discourse to enhance communication. Indeed, both environmental justice theory and Indigenous literatures point in the direction that cosmopolitics may find fruitful ground in the political discourse of transnational movements that include environmental justice as one of many concerns, rather than in national movements that may be narrower in scope. PubDate: 2016-08-11
Authors:Nardizzi V. Abstract: In ecocriticism, “pastoral” has a history of being used as a term of disparagement.11 In Pastoral, Terry Gifford imagines two examples in which it might be employed in such a “pejorative,” “critical, [and] dismissive sense”: a “Greenpeace supporter might use the term as a criticism of the tree poem if it ignored the presence of pollution or the threat to urban trees from city developers” and a “farm worker might say that a novel was a pastoral if it celebrated a landscape as though no-one actually sweated to maintain it on a low income” (2). In Ecocriticism, a title published in the same series as Pastoral, Greg Garrard elaborates the use of “pastoral” in Gifford’s examples. In Garrard’s formulation, the “pejorative sense in which ‘pastoral’ implies an idealisation of rural life that obscures the realities of labour and hardship” “emerges especially in Marxist critiques of Romanticism” (Ecocriticism 33, 34). The demystification of “pastoral” can thus challenge models of ecology and ecocriticism that take as “an article of faith” the “idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies” (56, 57). More recently, Steve Mentz has aligned Garrard’s ”idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint” with sustainability, since both sustainability and pastoral, in Mentz’s view, are green “fantas[ies] about stasis” (“After Sustainability,” 586). They both figure “imaginary world[s] in which we can trust that whatever happened yesterday will keep happening tomorrow,” and this sort of fantasy will prove, as Mentz predicts, inadequate to the task of imagining narratives for living with the catastrophic effects of climate change (586). Our thinking in the twenty-first century must find a way to “escape pastoral nostalgia” in order to embrace a “postsustainability” (587, 589) that is also, of course, “postpastoral” (588).22 PubDate: 2016-08-07
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[370 journals]
