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Worldwide environmental crisis has become increasingly visible over the last few decades as the full scope of anthropogenic climate change manifests itself and large-scale natural resource extraction has expanded into formerly remote areas that seemed beyond the reach of industrialization. Scientists and popular culture alike have turned to the term "Anthropocene" to capture the global scale of environmental and even geological transformations that humans have carried out over the last two centuries. The chapters in Ecological Crisis and Cultural Representation in Latin America examine the dynamics and interplay between local cultures and the expansion of global capitalism in Latin America, emphasizing the role of art in bearing witness to and generating awareness of environmental and social crises, but also its possibilities for formulating solutions. They take particular care to draw out the ways in which local environmental crises in Latin American nations are witnessed and imagined as part of a global system, focusing on the problems of time, scale, and complexity as key terms in conceiving the dimensions of crisis. At the same time, they question the notion of the Anthropocene as a species-wide "human" historical project, making visible the coloniality of natural resource extraction in Latin America and its dire effects for local people, cultures, and environments. Taking an ecocritical approach to Latin American cultural production including literature, film, performance, and digital artwork, the chapters in this volume develop a notion of ecological crisis that captures not only its documentary sense in the representation of environmental destruction (the degradation of the oikos), but also the crisis in the modern worldview (logos) that the acknowledgment of crisis provokes. In this sense, crisis is also the promise of a turning point, of the possibilities for change. Latin American representations of ecological crisis thus create the conditions for projects that decolonize environments, developing new, sustainable ways of conceiving of and relating to our world or returning to old ones.
This book extensively analyzes the literary works of fiction that draw on the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami that occurred on March 11, 2011. This disaster inspired literally hundreds of fictional works in Japan from the time of the events through 2017. This response represents a unique and perhaps unprecedented cultural phenomenon in the world. Since a variety of writers in different genres, and even amateurs, have written and published books inspired by their experiences of the disaster, it is extremely difficult to cover the entire body of Japanese “post-3.11 literature”. Because of the breadth of this literary response, there is a scarcity of research on the subject available. This book offers the first comprehensive review of Japan’s recent post-disaster literary production to the English audience.
Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
American literature has long celebrated the figure of the self-made man and the idea of establishing selfhood, particularly male selfhood, in nature. However, during the crisis of masculinity that swept across America in the middle of the twentieth century, a generation of writers started exploring a different kind of a man. This was a figure who was concerned not so much with the loss of the West or the desire to recover a wilderness, but with how to live in an ordinary, domesticated continent. Masculinity and Place in American Literature since 1950 explores the role of place in negotiating, reinforcing, and subverting articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the work of four American writers from the latter part of the 20th century—John Cheever, John Updike, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. The book argues that American fiction by white male writers between the 1950s and the present day is compelled by the troubled and troubling relationship between masculinity and place. This relationship is deeply embedded in how ideals of masculinity are predicated upon the experience of the physical world, and how the symbolic logic of masculinity is continually subverted by alternative conceptions of dwelling and ecological consciousness.
Now more than ever—in a time when Americans still do not believe that humans are the primary cause of Earth's climate change crisis, the burden on educators to inform, challenge, and motivate students about sustainability is greater than it ever has been. On college campuses, writing intensive courses, often located within First-Year or General Education curricula, are an ideal place to take up this charge because of the flexibility of their content and the high volume of students that they reach. In this volume, a varied group of composition instructors with wide ranges and types of experiences provides best practices for bringing issues surrounding climate change into the writing classroom. From literature-based composition and creative writing courses to design thinking workshops to seminars "against sustainability," the authors in this volume lay out a multitude of possibilities for blending writing and environmental concerns that fellow practitioners can easily adopt or modify for their own use.
Water is a symbol of life, wisdom, fertility, purity, and death. Water also sustains and nourishes, irrigates our crops, keeps us clean and healthy, and contributes to our energy needs. But a strain has been put on our water resources as increased energy demands combine with the effects of climate change to create a treacherous environment. Individuals and communities around the globe increasingly face droughts, floods, water pollution, water scarcity, and even water wars. We tend to address and solve these concerns through scientific and technological innovations, but social and cultural analyses and solutions are needed as well. In this edited collection, contributors tackle current water issues in the era of climate change using a wide variety of recent literature and film. At its core, this collection demonstrates that water is an immense reservoir of artistic potential and an agent of historical and cultural exchange. Creating familiar and relatable contexts for water dilemmas, authors and directors of contemporary literary texts and films present compelling stories of our relationships to water, water health, ecosystems, and conservation. They also explore how global water problems affect local communities around the world and intersect with social and cultural aspects such as health, citizenship, class, gender, race, and ethnicity. This transformative work highlights the cultural significance of water—the source of life and a powerful symbol in numerous cultures. It also raises awareness about global water debates and crises.
Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s 1989 philosophical travelogue Towards the River’s Mouth explores perception, memory, place and space as it recounts a series of journeys across the Po River Valley in northern Italy. The book seeks to document the “new Italian landscape” where divisions between the urban and rural were being blurred into what Celati terms “a new variety of countryside where one breathes an air of urban solitude.” Celati traveled by train, by bus, and on foot, at times with photographer Luigi Ghirri, at others exploring on his own without predetermined itineraries, taking notes on the places he encountered, watching and listening to people in stations, fields, bars, houses, squares, and hotels. In this way the book took shape as Celati traveled and wrote, gathering and rewriting his notes into “stories of observation” (9). Celati attempts to find meaning by seeking the uncertain limits of our ability to discern everyday surroundings. “Every observation,” as he puts it, “needs liberate itself from the familiar codes it carries, to go adrift in the middle of all things not understood, in order to arrive at an outlet, where it must feel lost.” At the forefront of the then-nascent spatial turn in the humanities, Towards the River’s Mouth is a key text of what in recent years has been variously termed literary cartography, literary geography, and spatial poetics. Its call to carefully and affectionately examine our surroundings while attempting to step back from habitual ways of perceiving and moving through space, has resonated as much with literary scholars and other writers as with geographers and architects. By now a classic of twentieth-century Italian literature, it has in recent years garnered increasing attention, especially with the growth of ecocriticism and new materialism within the environmental humanities. This edition, translated into English for the first time, features an introduction that places Towards the River’s Mouth in the context of Celati’s other work, and a selection of ten scholarly essays by prominent figures in comparative literature and Italian studies.
Ecopoetics and the Global Landscape: Critical Essays surveys ecopoetry from a global perspective across different historical epochs. Its comparative approach foregrounds the importance of ecopoetics within the context of distinct national literatures and cultures to reveal the ubiquitous intersection of poetry with ecocriticism. The collection analyzes environmental problems resulting from the legacies of colonialism and focuses on issues of environmental justice and indigenous issues as well as on the intersection of genocide studies and environmentalism. It also examines ecologically-informed modes of relating to the world. In particular, it engages with interactions between the human and nonhuman as well as mind and matter. Finally, it broadens the scope of place to include both the absent land of exiled peoples, and the urban, built environment.
Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.
The commitment to participate in ecological protection has grown considerably and, in the academic world, it has been tackled primarily by the Social Sciences. The Humanities has followed suit and several books have dealt with the reasons why such commitment is essential and morally imperative. What has been crucially lacking, however, are books that propose concrete pedagogical approaches to the study of environmental issues and aim at inspiring and motivating both educators and students to become actively engaged in the pursuit of ecological preservation. It is here that this book comes into play. Faced with the polluting of the earth, the devastating effect of climate change, and the inequalities of North/South resources to counter the throes of environmental degradation, our responsibility as educators and in particular as eco-pedagogues is to engage in theoretical discourses on the subject matter but also to begin to provide practitioners in all fields with essential tools to shape an ecological sense of consciousness among future leaders of the earth: our students.