Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature

Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature
Author: Riccardo Moratto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000553426

Focusing on ecocritical aspects throughout Chinese literature, particularly modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the contributors to this book examine the environmental and ecological dimensions of notions such as qing (情) and jing (境). Chinese modern and contemporary environmental writing offers a unique aesthetic perspective toward the natural world. Such a perspective is mainly ecological and allows human subjects to take a benign and nonutilitarian attitude toward nature. The contributors to this book demonstrate how Chinese literary ecology tends toward an ecological-systemic holism from which all human behaviors should be closely examined. They do so by examining a range of writers and genres, including Liu Cixin’s science fiction, Wu Ming-yi’s environmental fiction, and Zhang Chengzhi’s historical narratives. This book provides valuable insights for scholars and students looking to understand how Chinese literature conceptualizes the relationship between humanity and nature, as well as our role and position within the natural realm.

Arcadia Updated

Arcadia Updated
Author: Marius Fiskevold
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2018-10-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429881649

Arcadia Updated delves into the concept of landscape as it is shaped by the literary tradition and material works known as pastoral. Referring to several of the tradition’s works as well as scholarly critiques, Fiskevold and Geelmuyden highlight how individual landscape perception is primarily a cultural construct: each individual may see a unique landscape based on personal experiences, but simultaneously, landscape represents a tradition of engaging with nature and land, which has been largely forgotten. In re-engaging and connecting the practice of understanding landscapes with the pastoral tradition, the authors establish a common ground for treating landscape as an object of analysis in landscape planning. Arcadia Updated contributes to the methodological debate concerning landscape character assessment. Including 30 black-and-white images, this book analyses how humans engage with land organically, materially and communicatively. It seeks to raise landscape awareness as both an individual and a collective act of imagination. The practice of analysing landscapes is an ongoing culture of reinterpreting the land as landscape in response to society’s development and technical progress. The role of the landscape analyst is to interpret the contemporary world and offer visual explanations of it. This book will be beneficial to professional landscape planners as well as to academics and students of landscape, literature and cultural studies. It provides an essential contribution to the cross-disciplinarity of the landscape discourse.

Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in the Works of John Banville

Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in the Works of John Banville
Author: Alexander G.Z. Myers
Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2018-08-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3772056474

John Banvilles works waver indecisively between modernism and postmodernism. This study offers a hitherto unexplored vista on his works and argues that Banville is a post-/modern pastoralist. The pastoral lens opens new vistas to Banville's central concerns: the collusion of ethics and aesthetics, self-identification in narrative, and the topography of the troubled mind. Banvilles characters harbour an Arcadia of the unconscious conditioned by a subtext of nostalgia. Caught in a crisis, his characters explore, subvert and transform the pastoral mode into an ambiguous quest for a stable self.

Crossroads of Colonial Cultures

Crossroads of Colonial Cultures
Author: Gesine Müller
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2018-04-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110492334

The study examines cultural effects of various colonial systems of government in the Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean in a little investigated period of transition: from the French Revolution to the abolition of slavery in Cuba (1789–1886). The comparison of cultural transfer processes by means of literary production from and about the Caribbean, embedded in a broader context of the circulation of culture and knowledge deciphers the different transculturations of European discourses in the colonies as well as the repercussions of these transculturations on the motherland’s ideas of the colonial other: The loss of a culturally binding centre in the case of the Spanish colonies – in contrast to France’s strong presence and binding force – is accompanied by a multirelationality which increasingly shapes hispanophone Caribbean literature and promotes the pursuit for political independence. The book provides necessary revision to the idea that the 19th-century Caribbean can only be understood as an outpost of the European metropolises. Examining the kaleidoscope of the colonial Caribbean opens new insights into the early processes of cultural globalisation and questions our established concept of a genuine western modernity. Updated and expanded translation of Die koloniale Karibik. Transferprozesse in hispanophonen und frankophonen Literaturen, De Gruyter (mimesis 53), 2012

Landscape and Power in Geographical Space as a Social-Aesthetic Construct

Landscape and Power in Geographical Space as a Social-Aesthetic Construct
Author: Olaf Kühne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319729020

This book examines the power definiteness of landscape from a social constructivist perspective with a particular focus on the importance of aesthetic concepts of landscape in development. It seeks to answer the question of how societal notions of landscape emerge, how they are individually updated and how these ideas affect the use and design of physical space. It also analyzes how physical manifestations of societal activity impact on understandings of individual and societal landscapes and addresses the essential aspect of the social construction of landscape, cultural specificity, which in turn is discussed in the context of the expansion of a western landscape concept. The book offers an unprecedented, comprehensive and detailed examination of societal power relations in the context of landscape development. The numerous case studies from the physical manifestation of modern spatial planning in the United States, the power discourses concerning the design of model railway landscapes, and the medial production of stereotypical landscape notions shed light on the complex and multilayered interactions of collective and individual landscape references. It is a valuable resource for geographers, sociologists, landscape architects, landscape planners and philosophers.

The Image of the River in Latin/o American Literature

The Image of the River in Latin/o American Literature
Author: Jeanie Murphy
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2017-12-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498547303

Although fictional—and often fantastic—representations of nature have been a distinguishing feature of Latin American literature for centuries, ecocriticism, understood as the study of literature as it relates to depictions of the natural world, environmental issues, and the ways in which human beings interact and identify with their natural surroundings, did not emerge as a field of scholarly interest in the region until the end of the twentieth century. This volume employs an ecocritical lens in order to explore and question the use of the river imagery in Latino and Latin American literature from the colonial period to our modern world, creating a space in which to examine both its literal and figurative meanings, associated as much with processes of a personal nature as with those of the collective experience in the region. The slow, meandering streams of nostalgia, the raging currents of conflict or the stagnant waters of social decay are just a few of the ways in which the river has become an important symbol and inspiration to many of the region’s writers. This book offers a diverse collection of writings that, through a trans-historical and trans-geographical perspective, allows us, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, to reflect on the rich and dynamic image of the river and, by extension, on the vital context of Latin/o America, its people and societies.

Sobras espectrales

Sobras espectrales
Author: Autores Varios
Publisher: Linkgua
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2022-12-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 8411269981

Sobras espectrales: gestiones estético-políticos de los residuos es una antología de crítica cultural inspiradora y en resonancia con el actual giro material en las humanidades. El conjunto de ensayos indaga sobre el dispositivo de lo residual para repensar nuestro presente a través de expresiones culturales mayoritariamente latinoamericanas. Estéticas que se enfocan en la presencia y agencia de los restos de memoria, en las sobras del hiperconsumo, y en los desechos reales y simbólicos. El libro piensa cómo puede leerse aquello que está fuera del sistema de producción, como síntoma de lo social, lo ecológico y lo político. Sin caer en la nostalgia romántica, Adriana López-Labourdette y Valeria Wagner convierten la crítica cultural en arqueología de nuestro presente y plantean modos reivindicativos de pensar el mundo basurizado, el vertedero y la ruina (económica, ambiental y social). Asumiendo una multiplicidad de enfoques de diferentes disciplinas, este volumen colectivo abarca desde la poesía brasileña, la narrativa cubana, peruana, chilena y argentina, hasta la vanguardia venezolana, el cine transnacional y los vertederos cubiertos en Ginebra (Suiza) y Uranium City (Canadá). Se encontrará aquí una lectura de nuestra imposibilidad de gestionar la producción de desechos, o de archivar completamente los restos del pasado. Una lectura hecha desde América Latina hacia el mundo y una reflexión aguda sobre los procesos (insuficientes) de reciclaje tanto en el propio arte, como en nuestros sistemas sociales, políticos y estéticos. Nanne Timmer, Universidad de Leiden

"Nation" en question

Author: Rainer Hudemann
Publisher: De Gruyter Akademie Forschung
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

Die Nation auf dem Prüfstand ist aus einem gemeinsamen Projekt deutscher, französischer und amerikanischer Universitäten hervorgegangen. In fruchtbarer Synthese von geschichts-, politik-, kultur-, sprach- und literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen diskutieren die Autoren das Spannungsverhältnis von Nation und Transnationalität im beginnenden 3. Jahrtausend. Dem Ineinandergreifen von Nation und transnationalen Strukturen gilt das besondere Interesse: in Transferprozessen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, in der partiellen Auflösung der 'Nation' als heuristischer Kategorie bereits auf dem Höhepunkt der europäischen Nationalstaatsbildung im 19. Jahrhundert, im facettenreichen Spannungsverhältnis von Nation, Europäisierung und Globalisierung im 20. Jahrhundert sowie in neuen Nationsbildungsprozessen des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts.