Unnatural Ecopoetics

Unnatural Ecopoetics
Author: Sarah Nolan
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 233
Release: 2017-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0874174686

What constitutes an environment in American literature is an issue that has undergone much debate across environmental humanities in the last decade. In the field, some have argued that environments are markedly natural or wild sites while others contend literary spaces can be both wild and urban, or even cultural. Yet, few of the works produced to date have addressed the pronounced influence the author of a text has on a literary environment. Despite exciting work on materiality and culture in conceptions of environments, critics have not yet fully examined the contributions of poetry’s language, form, and self-awareness in rethinking what constitutes an environment. By approaching environments in a new way, Nolan closes this gap and recognizes how contemporary poets employ self-reflexive commentary and formal experimentation in order to create new natural/cultural environments on the page. She proposes a radical new direction for ecopoetics and deploys it in relation to four major American poets. Working from literal to textual spaces through the contemporary poetry of A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters, the book presents applications of unnatural ecopoetics in poetic environments, ones that do not engage with traditional ideas of nature and would otherwise remain outside the scope of ecocritical and ecopoetic studies. Nolan proposes a new practical approach for reading poetic language. Ecocriticism is a very fluid and evolving discipline, and Nolan’s pioneering new book pushes the boundaries of second-wave ecopoetics—the fundamental issue being what is nature/natural, and how does poetic language, particularly self-conscious contemporary poetic agency, contribute to and complicate that question.

Unnatural Ecopoetics

Unnatural Ecopoetics
Author: Sarah Nolan
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2017-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781943859276

What constitutes an environment in American literature is an issue that has undergone much debate across environmental humanities in the last decade. In the field, some have argued that environments are markedly natural or wild sites while others contend literary spaces can be both wild and urban, or even cultural. Yet, few of the works produced to date have addressed the pronounced influence the author of a text has on a literary environment. Despite exciting work on materiality and culture in conceptions of environments, critics have not yet fully examined the contributions of poetry’s language, form, and self-awareness in rethinking what constitutes an environment. By approaching environments in a new way, Nolan closes this gap and recognizes how contemporary poets employ self-reflexive commentary and formal experimentation in order to create new natural/cultural environments on the page. She proposes a radical new direction for ecopoetics and deploys it in relation to four major American poets. Working from literal to textual spaces through the contemporary poetry of A.R. Ammons’s Garbage, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, Susan Howe’s The Midnight, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters, the book presents applications of unnatural ecopoetics in poetic environments, ones that do not engage with traditional ideas of nature and would otherwise remain outside the scope of ecocritical and ecopoetic studies. Nolan proposes a new practical approach for reading poetic language. Ecocriticism is a very fluid and evolving discipline, and Nolan’s pioneering new book pushes the boundaries of second-wave ecopoetics—the fundamental issue being what is nature/natural, and how does poetic language, particularly self-conscious contemporary poetic agency, contribute to and complicate that question.

The Zen of Ecopoetics

The Zen of Ecopoetics
Author: Enaiê Mairê Azambuja
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2023-12-22
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1003837840

This book is the first comprehensive study investigating the cultural affinities and resonances of Zen in early twentieth-century American poetry and its contribution to current definitions of ecopoetics, focusing on four key poets: William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E.E. Cummings. Bringing together a range of texts and perspectives and using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on Eastern and Western philosophies, including Zen and Taoism, posthumanism and new materialism, this book adds to and extends the field of ecocriticism into new debates. Its broad approach, informed by literary studies, ecocriticism, and religious studies, proposes the expansion of ecopoetics to include the relationship between poetic materiality and spirituality. It develops ‘cosmopoetics’ as a new literary-theoretical concept of the poetic imagination as a contemplative means to achieving a deeper understanding of the human interdependence with the non-human. Addressing the critical gap between materialism and spirituality in modernist American poetry, The Zen of Ecopoetics promotes new forms of awareness and understanding about our relationship with non-human beings and environments. It will be of interest to scholars, researchers, and students in ecocriticism, literary theory, poetry, and religious studies.

Ecopoetic Place-Making

Ecopoetic Place-Making
Author: Judith Rauscher
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-08-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3839469341

American ecopoetries of migration explore the conflicted relationships of mobile subjects to the nonhuman world and thus offer valuable environmental insight for our current age of mass mobility and global ecological crisis. In Ecopoetic Place-Making, Judith Rauscher analyzes the works of five contemporary American poets of migration, drawing from ecocriticism and mobility studies. The poets discussed in her study challenge exclusionary notions of place-attachment and engage in ecopoetic place-making from different perspectives of mobility, testifying to the potential of poetry as a means of conceptualizing alternative environmental imaginaries for our contemporary world on the move.

Modern Ecopoetry

Modern Ecopoetry
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004445277

Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World explores the fruitful dialogue between poetry and the more-than-human world from various critical standpoints in modern English-writing poets from diverse backgrounds such as the USA, the UK, Canada, India, and Pakistan.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry
Author: Craig Svonkin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 549
Release: 2023-01-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350062529

With chapters written by leading scholars such as Steven Gould Axelrod, Cary Nelson, and Marjorie Perloff, this comprehensive Handbook explores the full range and diversity of poetry and criticism in 21st-century America. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry covers such topics as: · Major histories and genealogies of post-war poetry – from the language poets and the Black Arts Movement to New York school and the Beats · Poetry, identity and community – from African American, Chicana/o and Native American poetry to Queer verse and the poetics of disability · Key genres and forms – including digital, visual, documentary and children's poetry · Central critical themes – economics, publishing, popular culture, ecopoetics, translation and biography The book also includes an interview section in which major contemporary poets such as Rae Armantrout, and Claudia Rankine reflect on the craft and value of poetry today.

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics
Author: Julia Fiedorczuk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2023-09-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000952479

The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics offers comprehensive coverage of the vital and growing movement of ecopoetics. This volume begins with a general introduction to the field, followed by six sections: Perspectives: broad overviews engaging fields such as biosemiosis, kinship praxis, and philosophical approaches Experiments: formal innovations developed by poets in response to planetary crises Earth and Water: explorations of poetic entanglement with planetary chemical and biological systems Waste/Toxicity/Precarity: poetics addressing the effects of pollution and climate change Environmental Justice and Activism: examinations of poetry as an engine of political and cultural change Region and Place: an international array of traditional and contemporary geographically focused responses to ecosystems and environmental conditions; and Subjectivities/Affects/Sexualities: investigations of gender, ethnicity, and race as they intersect with ecological concerns Each section includes an overview and summary addressing the specific essays in the section. These previously unpublished essays represent a wide variety of nationalities, backgrounds, perspectives, and critical approaches exploring the interdisciplinary field of ecopoetics. Contributions from leading scholars working across the globe make The Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics a landmark textbook and reference for a variety of researchers and students.

Finding the Weight of Things

Finding the Weight of Things
Author: George Hart
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0817321136

"A critical study of the poetry of Larry Eigner through the lens of both disability studies and ecopoetics, forming the basis of an "ecrippoetics.""--

New International Voices in Ecocriticism

New International Voices in Ecocriticism
Author: Serpil Oppermann
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498501486

With twelve original essays that characterize truly international ecocriticisms, New International Voices in Ecocriticism presents a compendium of ecocritical approaches, including ecocritical theory, ecopoetics, ecocritical analyses of literary, cultural, and musical texts (especially those not commonly studied in mainstream ecocriticism), and new critical vistas on human-nonhuman relations, postcolonial subjects, material selves, gender, and queer ecologies. It develops new perspectives on literature, culture, and the environment. The essays, written by contributors from the United States, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Spain, China, India, and South Africa, cover novels, drama, autobiography, music, and poetry, mixing traditional and popular forms. Popular culture and the production and circulation of cultural imaginaries feature prominently in this volume—how people view their world and the manner in which they share their perspectives, including the way these perspectives challenge each other globally and locally. In this sense the book also probes borders, border transgression, and border permeability. By offering diverse ecocritical approaches, the essays affirm the significance and necessity of international perspectives in environmental humanities, and thus offer unique responses to environmental problems and that, in some sense, affect many beginning and established scholars.

Of Land, Bones, and Money

Of Land, Bones, and Money
Author: Emily McGiffin
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2019-07-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813942772

The South African literature of iimbongi, the oral poets of the amaXhosa people, has long shaped understandings of landscape and history and offered a forum for grappling with change. Of Land, Bones, and Money examines the shifting role of these poets in South African society and the ways in which they have helped inform responses to segregation, apartheid, the injustices of extractive capitalism, and contemporary politics in South Africa. Emily McGiffin first discusses the history of the amaXhosa people and the environment of their homelands before moving on to the arrival of the British, who began a relentless campaign annexing land and resources in the region. Drawing on scholarship in the fields of human geography, political ecology, and postcolonial ecocriticism, she considers isiXhosa poetry in translation within its cultural, historical, and environmental contexts, investigating how these poems struggle with the arrival and expansion of the exploitation of natural resources in South Africa and the entrenchment of profoundly racist politics that the process entailed. In contemporary South Africa, iimbongi remain a respected source of knowledge and cultural identity. Their ongoing practice of producing complex, spiritually rich literature continues to have a profound social effect, contributing directly to the healing and well-being of their audiences, to political transformation, and to environmental justice.