Ecocriticism Unbound – serie

How do physical things differ from non-things—human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis—that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted.

Forsaken Things explores how three late modernist writers turned to objects, environments, and creaturely life to make sense of history and our perception of the world. Responding critically to the recent, influential ‘nonhuman turn’ in literary studies, the book advances a conception of ‘late modernism’ based on the relationship between materiality and language in the work of Samuel Beckett, W.G. Sebald, and Olga Tokarczuk, compared together here for the first time and covering the period from the Second World War to the present day. For all three writers, the category of the ‘human’ has disintegrated and become unsustainable in the twentieth century, leading them to reimagine our relationship with ‘things’ and nonhuman life. Through reading of materialities like waste and ruins and the representation of the nonhuman, the book demonstrates how this relationship is essentially an aesthetic, political, and ethical one, providing insight into the violent ways in which modernity dispenses with human and nonhuman alike. Forsaken Things enters into critical conversation with literary object studies and ecocriticism while revisiting the ethical, ecological, and political assumptions of the ‘nonhuman turn’ in literature and philosophy.

The environmental memoir has become a culturally prominent literary form and provides an ideal site for investigating the shifting destinies of the concept of the sublime in the context of ecological crises and the Anthropocene. This book explores the affordances and limits of the sublime as a means of representing environmental crises and human–nonhuman relationships in contemporary American memoirs. More specifically, it examines what it terms contemporary U.S. ecobiographical memoirs, showing how they reconfigure the traditional sublime by deploying and reshaping it to depict mountains and mountaineering, hunting, agriculture, atomic power, and oil extraction. In doing so, it engages with a broad range of affects—not only the sublime but also the eerie and the ‘stuplime’—as well as ecological categories such as the haptic and toxic sublime, making a theoretically ambitious intervention in contemporary debates on literature and environmental crisis.