Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles) ISSN (Print) 1076-0962 - ISSN (Online) 1759-1090 Published by Oxford University Press[409 journals]
Authors:Slovic S. Pages: 1 - 4 Abstract: The centerpiece of this issue is a special cluster devoted to Queering Ecopoetics, coordinated by Angela Hume and Samia Rahimtoola, featuring an eloquent introduction and three compelling articles. In their Introduction, Hume and Rahimtoola highlight, among other important ideas, the “dangerous, if seductive, fiction” of the “environmental subject,” the myth of the isolated and self-reliant individual, which permeates traditional commentary on environmental texts. They point out that this fiction “fails to account for our dependence on and vulnerability to larger social and ecological contexts.” Even Thoreau’s experiment at Walden, they remind us, begins, in a sense, when Thoreau “borrows an ax from his neighbor.” PubDate: Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy022 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Chou S. Pages: 5 - 24 Abstract: Urban foraging reemerged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a hip and stylish mode of urban food production, catching the fancy of a growing number of urban dwellers around the world. From field books on the identification of wild plants, to personal accounts of gleaning the urban wilderness, urban foraging literature has quickly claimed a place on lists of best-sellers even as critical attention continues to overlook the genre. Award-winning food writer Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), lawyer-turned-forager Tama Matsuoka Wong and chef de cuisine Eddy Leroux’s field guide-cookbook Foraged Flavor (2012), and Oregon-based food activist Rebecca Lerner’s Dandelion Hunter (2013) represent a few of the many faces of British and American foragers who scavenge urban surroundings for supplemental greens, berries, mushrooms, and roots for their dinner tables. The sheer diversity of urban foraging literature published over the last ten years evinces, however, that the resurgence of this most ancient form of subsistence maybe more than an environmentalist fad of white urban elites. The processes of finding, harvesting, and consuming edible wild plants subvert the conception of American cities as environmental food deserts, offering a window through which to imagine urban space as a site of cultural and environmental sustainability. PubDate: Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy009 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Ryden K. Pages: 25 - 42 Abstract: If one of the projects of ecocriticism has been to suggest some ways in which its methods and perspectives can be extended to fields of study that may not seem obviously amenable to it, that do not appear to be particularly “green” on the surface, then the reverse should also be true: we should be able to use the approaches offered by those disparate academic areas to shed light on the social and cultural ways in which we have constructed the natural world. One such area that suggests itself—that has been hiding in plain sight, basically—is what has come to be called “history of the book” or the study of print culture. After all, ecocritics spend a lot of time reading books and examining their environmental implications, but what about the books themselves, the media that deliver the texts that the ecocritics study' How might they serve as both a material and conceptual interface between readers and the world of nonhuman nature' I am not referring only to obvious questions of resource use—the trees that make the paper, the fuel used in distribution, and so on—but to larger questions having to do with how books position people relative to the systems of social and cultural structures in which they live and through which they perceive and experience the world. We read books to help us think about nature; how can we read books as books to help achieve the same end' PubDate: Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy007 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Latchaw J. Pages: 43 - 61 Abstract: Look at My works! See how beautiful they are—how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it that you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.(Midrash Kohelet Rabbah, on Ecclesiastes 7: 13) PubDate: Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy004 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Leise C. Pages: 62 - 79 Abstract: It is telling that the reporter who covered the occasion for The Dalles Chronicle likened [the drowning of Celilo] to the detonation of an atomic bomb–Katrine Barber, Death of Celilo Falls, 13. PubDate: Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy008 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Anderson K. Pages: 80 - 94 Abstract: Jane Austen’s heroines are environmentalists, as evidenced by a pervasive dichotomy in her fictional landscape in which nature-lovers transcend the eco-callous in virtue and likeability. In Pride and Prejudice, the charismatic Elizabeth Bennet belongs to fields and groves and rarely “shut[s herself] into her own room” (PP 186)11 unless confronting a problem, whereas Bingley’s artificial sisters always appear indoors, and Charlotte Lucas sells herself for a home she can enjoy only by giving her moronic husband monopoly of the garden. Elizabeth’s habit of outdoor tramps lends parody to Caroline Bingley’s invitation to “‘take a turn about the room’” (56).22 Similarly, Anne Elliot of Persuasion “glorie[s] in the sea” (P 102) and its rejuvenating influence, while her shallow sister Elizabeth can only move “with exultation from one drawing-room to the other” (138). The green young Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey declares to Henry that “‘[t]he pleasure of walking and breathing fresh air is enough for me, and in fine weather I am out more than half my time.—Mamma says, I am never within’” (NA 174); by contrast, her false friend Isabella Thorpe man-chases her way through ballrooms, city streets, and country drives without heeding her surroundings. More famously, Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood expresses a “passion for dead leaves” (SS 88) and bids a bittersweet farewell to the trees of Norland when she and her family are forced to move out, and Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price delivers a “rhapsodizing” ode on the evergreen. Fanny’s foil, narcissist Mary Crawford, responds to this rhapsody by infamously avowing to “‘see[ing] no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it’” (MP 209–10).33 PubDate: Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy003 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Balkan S. Pages: 115 - 133 Abstract: The ideas of equality and justice from which the dominant political imaginary draws its legitimacy have never been anything other than grotesque fictions designed to secure exactly the opposite of those professed ends.–Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) PubDate: Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy006 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Hume A; Rahimtoola S. Pages: 134 - 149 Abstract: When lesbian Chicana poet and essayist Gloria Anzaldúa spoke of home, she said, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back” (21). To be a queer Mexican American woman was, for Anzaldúa, to live in complicated, uncomfortable relationship to environment and home. “[I]f going home is denied me,” Anzaldúa writes, “then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza” (22). At once extending and contravening an ecocritical tradition that has long based environmental ethics in cultivating deep relationships to place, Anzaldúa orients us toward place’s utopian potentials. Here, the making of a new home—constructed in spite of oppressive cultural imperatives for ethnic purity, monolingualism, and the patrilineal nuclear family—becomes a work of cultural and poetic invention that creates a more sustaining social and ecological context than the existing culture offers. PubDate: Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy014 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Ensor S. Pages: 150 - 168 Abstract: In their “Ecosex Manifesto,” first published in 2011, queer performance artists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle lay bare their eroticized habits of environmental care: “[Ecosexuals] make love with the earth… .We shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with our feet, and talk erotically to plants… .” Such an approach, which counters mainstream environmentalism’s ascetic imperatives by advocating unbounded pleasure, playfully indexes one of the foundational impasses inhibiting the development of a queer ecocriticism: the conflicting status of embodied desire—and thus of touch—in its two constitutive fields. In her 1997 essay “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism,” ecofeminist scholar Greta Gaard analyzed a pervasive “erotophobia” in Western Culture that other critics have identified in environmental discourse more specifically (139). As cultural critic Andrew Ross pithily suggests, “Unlike other new social movements, ecology is commonly perceived as the one that says no, the antipleasure voice that says you’re never gonna get it, so get used to going without” (268). Clearly, a significant part of the environmentalist ethos is to make do with less: to reduce our consumption, to limit our desires, to forego what we so deeply want. In keeping with familiar imperatives like “leave no trace,” the practice of stewardship is often understood to be predicated on forms of restraint and inaction, leaving little room for either desire or pleasure—except, of course, to the extent that both are denied. The emphasis on self-deprivation ingrained within environmentalism conflicts—potentially violently—with the discourses of queer theory, which are foundationally concerned with desires and their free expression. PubDate: Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy011 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Huebert D. Pages: 169 - 185 Abstract: This essay aims to unearth the queer potentialities of equine eros in the poetry of Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan and Muscogee Creek author Joy Harjo, arguing that these two poets engage with the eroticism of horses as part of their larger decolonial projects of attendance to the nonhuman world. Following Arianne Burford’s argument that “Queer Theory” should work alongside Indigenous studies to cultivate “more nuanced understanding and coalition between queers and Native Americans” (170), I advocate a queer approach, where “queer,” drawing on Mark Rifkin’s work in When Did Indians Become Straight' (2011), means the sense of that which bends or otherwise contorts the straightness mandated by familiar, Western regimes of sexuality—institutions that simultaneously enforce heterosexual and intraspecies comportments of desire. What I add to analyses by Rifkin, Burford, and other critics working at the intersections of queer studies and Indigenous studies is a focus on the queerness of nonhuman eros and sexuality. Part of my agenda, then, is to show how reading Hogan and Harjo’s equine erotopoetics can open a productive membrane of intersection between queer theory, Indigenous studies, and animal studies. PubDate: Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy012 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Lawler P. Pages: 210 - 213 Abstract: Breakdown in Missoula. Hills like softening hips.Someone claims he’s seen my face inPeterson's Guide to Flowers.White water rafting in Glacier Park amongthe monkey-flowers mingling with moss.When I look into the eyeof a ragged mountain goat, I see my uncle.When I look into the eyeof a ragged mountain goat, I see Gary Snyder. I can't concentrate on driving. I start bumping into things.Attending a conference on Literature and Nature.I feel inside out. Because our losses have beenconfirmed, I have come in search of gurus.Experiencing the urge to be swallowedby all that is not me, I am lookinginto the eye of what we are losing.Obviously I need to be saved,and my daughter isn't here to see this.We are still in the Pleistocene Age.Whatever comes out of the eyewill carve its message in the face.I hear about Alastor and Dorothy Wordsworthand Merleau-Ponty. The presentersare talking about A Thousand Acresand Ken Saro Wiwa. I have come in search of sages.The Japanese poet tells us our sole purposeis to take care of the spiritual interior of words. Kotodama.Either the world exists beneath the miasma of language,or words already live as the light inside things.Like my uncle, I am a farmer. I plant words on paper.Maybe I am afraid because of the damage,the cracks, the longing, the fatigue.We search for places on the campus to cry.It is early evening in Missoula.We cross a bridge where homelessmen carve walking sticks.Maybe it is because I am inside out.I have spent a lot of time in places that have disappeared.Barry Lopez is reading his work under a tent,and a double rainbow appears. I have comein search of meaning, the whole sky bursts with rainbows.I have come in search of truths. The oblique and the transparent. The mountains move.In wakeful attentiveness, we climb outof our stories. A broken contract pinned to the sky.A wonderful wound opens up over us.I've lost touch. I am up a riddlewithout a creek. I am in this maze of language.Maybe it is because I live too much on the inside.Near the end, a man who lives in the Yaaksteps up to the podium. He is named after a fish.Standing in front of a full auditorium,he asks us to help him save the Yaak.He starts to cry the tears of the grizzly,the honeybee, the salmon.Taking our wounds, he carries themin his mouth. We are where his silk heartbursts. The problem and the promise:We know what we are capable of.The vulnerability of beauty.The aspen, the fir, the spruce.Maybe it is because of Mount Despair.The flycatchers, waxwings,and swifts. The meadows and ermine.The crying man teaches us to swim.Before I leave Missoula, I see a clusterof wildflowers growing next to the river.The starflower and rosecrown, mountain ashand lupine, elkthistle and fireweeds.Each a torch of consciousness.I write my way in; I write my way out. I haven't risked enough.I have searched too hardfor endings, for closure, for finality.When I forget about the desire to be saved,I climb out of my stitches.I want to rub against everything that is alive.At least for now, all around me and inside me, is the intense odor of sage.I know not far away, on a bridge,homeless men are carving walking sticks back into forests. PubDate: Fri, 06 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isy005 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018)
Authors:Eperjesi J. Pages: 95 - 114 Abstract: Red pines, white pines; I wind my way between the rocks, the world full of the wonder of mountains and waters.– Sakkat Kim, “The Diamond Mountains” (59) PubDate: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT DOI: 10.1093/isle/isx049 Issue No:Vol. 25, No. 1 (2017)
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
[409 journals]
