The Ecophobia Hypothesis

The Ecophobia Hypothesis
Author: Simon Estok
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-06-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351384937

The Ecophobia Hypothesis grows out of the sense that while the theory of biophilia has productively addressed ideal human affinities with nature, the capacity of “the biophilia hypothesis” as an explanatory model of human/ environment relations is limited. The biophilia hypothesis cannot adequately account for the kinds of things that are going on in the world, things so extraordinary that we are increasingly coming to understand the current age as “the Anthropocene.” Building on the usefulness of the biophilia hypothesis, this book argues that biophilia exists on a broader spectrum that has not been adequately theorized. The Ecophobia Hypothesis claims that in order to contextualize biophilia (literally, the “love of life”) and the spectrum on which it sits, it is necessary to theorize how very un-philic human uses of the natural world are. This volume offers a rich tapestry of connected, comparative discussions about the new material turn and the urgent need to address the agency of genes, about the complexities of 21st century representations of ecophobia, and about how imagining terror interpenetrates the imagining of an increasingly oppositional natural environment. Furthermore, this book proposes that ecophobia is one root cause that explains why ecomedia—a veritably thriving industry—is having so little measurable impact in transforming our adaptive capacities. The ecophobia hypothesis offers an equation that determines the variable spectrums of the Anthropocene by measuring the ecophobic implications and inequalities of speciesism and the entanglement of environmental ethics with the writing of literary madness and pain. This work also investigates how current ecophobic perspectives systemically institutionalize the infrastructures of industrial agriculture and waste management. This is a book about revealing ecophobia and prompting transformational change.

Ecocriticism and Shakespeare

Ecocriticism and Shakespeare
Author: Simon C. Estok
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-04-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230118747

This book offers the term 'ecophobia' as a way of understanding and organizing representations of contempt for the natural world. Estok argues that this vocabulary is both necessary to the developing area of ecocritical studies and for our understandings of the representations of 'Nature' in Shakespeare.

Material Ecocriticism

Material Ecocriticism
Author: Serenella Iovino
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2014-09-24
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 025301400X

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.

Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis

Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis
Author: Robert Geal
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2021-07-12
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000405796

This book applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to explore how films fictionalising environmental disasters provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, while highlighting that even these apparently environmentally friendly films can still facilitate problematic real-world changes in how people treat the environment. Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis argues that these films exploit cinema’s inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectators, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction. The ideological nature of the ‘lifeboats’ on which these survivors escape, moreover, is accompanied by additional elements that constitute contemporary Cartesian subjectivity, such as class and gender binaries, restored nuclear families, individual as opposed to social responsibilities for disasters, and so on. The book conducts extensive analyses of these processes, before considering alternative forms of filmmaking that might avoid the dangers of this existing form of storytelling. The book’s new ecosophy and film theory establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive ‘symptom’ that everyday linguistic activities like watching films reinforce. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, literary studies (specifically ecocriticism), cultural studies, ecolinguistics, and ecosophy.

International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism

International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism
Author: Greta Gaard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2013-06-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134079591

Exploring environmental literature from a feminist perspective, this volume presents a diversity of feminist ecocritical approaches to affirm the continuing contributions, relevance, and necessity of a feminist perspective in environmental literature, culture, and science. Feminist ecocriticism has a substantial history, with roots in second- and third-wave feminist literary criticism, women’s environmental writing and social change activisms, and eco-cultural critique, and yet both feminist and ecofeminist literary perspectives have been marginalized. The essays in this collection build on the belief that the repertoire of violence (conceptual and literal) toward nature and women comprising our daily lives must become central to our ecocritical discussions, and that basic literacy in theories about ethics are fundamental to these discussions. The book offers an international collection of scholarship that includes ecocritical theory, literary criticism, and ecocultural analyses, bringing a diversity of perspectives in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. Reconnecting with the histories of feminist and ecofeminist literary criticism, and utilizing new developments in postcolonial ecocriticism, animal studies, queer theory, feminist and gender studies, cross-cultural and international ecocriticism, this timely volume develops a continuing and international feminist ecocritical perspective on literature, language, and culture.

Red Sky at Morning

Red Sky at Morning
Author: James Gustave Speth
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0300102321

Presents an analysis of the worsening global environmental crisis, citing ten contributors to environmental deterioration, including affluence, the American culture and its values, population, and poverty.

Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies

Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies
Author: Salma Monani
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317449126

This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.

EcoGothic

EcoGothic
Author: Andrew Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2015-11-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1526102927

This book will provide the first study of how the Gothic engages with ecocritical ideas. Ecocriticism has frequently explored images of environmental catastrophe, the wilderness, the idea of home, constructions of 'nature', and images of the post-apocalypse – images which are also central to a certain type of Gothic literature. By exploring the relationship between the ecocritical aspects of the Gothic and the Gothic elements of the ecocritical, this book provides a new way of looking at both the Gothic and ecocriticism. Writers discussed include Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Dan Simmons and Rana Dasgupta. The volume thus explores writing and film across various national contexts including Britain, America and Canada, as well as giving due consideration to how such issues might be discussed within a global context.

Surreal Entanglements

Surreal Entanglements
Author: Louise Economides
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000388344

This edited collection approaches the most pressing discourses of the Anthropocene and posthumanist culture through the surreal, yet instructive lens of Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. In contrast to universalist and essentializing ways of responding to new material realities, VanderMeer’s work invites us to re-imagine human subjectivity and other collectivities in the light of historically unique entanglements we face today: the ecological, technological, aesthetic, epistemological, and political challenges of life in the Anthropocene era. Situating these messy, multi-scalar, material complexities of life in close relation to their ecological, material, and colonialist histories, his fiction renders them at once troublingly familiar and strangely generative of other potentialities and insight. The collection measures VanderMeer’s work as a new kind of speculative surrealism, his texts capturing the strangeness of navigating a world in which "nature" has become radically uncanny due to global climate change and powerful bio-technologies. The first collection to survey academic engagements with VanderMeer, this book brings together scholars in the fields of environmental literature, science fiction, genre studies, American literary history, philosophy of technology, and digital cultures to reflect on the environmentally, culturally, aesthetically, and politically central questions his fiction poses to predominant understandings of the Anthropocene.

Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism
Author: Greta Gaard
Publisher: Temple University Press
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2010-09-03
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1439905487

Feminist scholars and activists explore the relationships among humans, animals, and the natural environment.