Studies in Literature, Culture, and the Environment / Studien zu Literatur, Kultur und Umwelt – serie

This book expounds fruitful ways of analysing matters of ecology, environments, nature, and the non-human world in a broad spectrum of material in French. Scholars from Canada, France, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States examine the work of writers and thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Arthur Rimbaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres, Michel Houellebecq, and Éric Chevillard. The diverse approaches in the volume signal a common desire to bring together form and content, politics and aesthetics, theory and practice, under the aegis of the environmental humanities.

This book applies the analytical methods of third-wave ecocriticism to selected twenty-first century Italian literary works. Turning abstract issues into narrative form, literary writing increases awareness of environmental issues as well as exerting a deep emotive influence on its readership. The author analyses Roberto Saviano's «Gomorra», Kai Zen's «Delta blues», Wu Ming's «Previsioni del tempo», Simona Vinci's «Rovina», Giancarlo di Cataldo's «Fuoco!», Laura Pugno's «Sirene», and Alessandra Montrucchio's «E poi la sete». He demonstrates that these works offer an invaluable opportunity to communicate meaningfully and accessibly the discomforting truths of global environmental change.

This study focuses on the relationship between environment, history, politics, and rhetorical discourses in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Delving into different aspects of Joyce’s use of nature and linguistic discourses in orchestrating a specific dynamic of eco-politics, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes cultural politics, historiographical poetics, and genetic criticism with close reading of the text. The first of the two sessions of the book addresses the environmental questions of land and consumption through discussions on co-operative politics, garden city movement, and the eco-politics of waste. The second section moves to examine the diverse ways in which nature and nation are (re)imagined exemplarily in Joyce’s composition of the forest and the marketplace. By examining several thematic environmental issues addressed in Ulysses with the evidence of historical and archival resources, this study has demonstrated that Joyce is after all a writer with the environment in mind, and that the imagination of nature in Ulysses is inseparable from that of the emergent nation of fin-de-siècle Ireland.

Das Anthropozän mit der Idee der systemischen Zusammenhänge von Mensch, Technologie und Umwelt ist durch Komplexität und disproportionale Skalierungseffekte von planetarischem und tiefenzeitlichem Ausmaß gekennzeichnet. Der Band geht der Frage nach, mit welchen Rhetoriken und Strategien Literatur und Kunst die Komplexität des Anthropozän auf menschliches Maß beziehen. Vor dem Hintergrund der Environmental Humanities untersuchen die 11 Beiträge das interdependente Beziehungsgeflecht von Mensch und agentieller ‹Natur› wie auch die Interaktion von unterschiedlichen zeitlichen, räumlichen und thematischen Skalen in Komposition, Figurendarstellung und Metaphorik (Raumschiff, Gaia, Weltgärtner) mit Bezug auf lokale Umweltprobleme und globale Zukunftsfragen. Mediale Austragsorte sind Erzählung, Epos, Climate und Science Fiction, Heimatroman, Ecodiegesis, Umweltlyrik, Hörspiel, Fotographie, Film und bildende Kunst.

Hispanic Ecocriticism finds a rich soil in the main topics of environmental concern in the literature of Latin America and Spain, not only as a source for renewing critical analysis and hermeneutics, but also for the benefit of global environmental awareness. In a renewed exchange of transatlantic relationships, Hispanic Ecocriticism intermingles Latin American ecocritical issues of interest — the oil industry; contamination of forests and rivers; urban ecologies; African, Andean, and Amazonian biocultural ecosystems — with those of interest in Spain — animal rights and the ecological footprints of human activity in contemporary narratives of eco-science fiction, in dystopias, and in literature inspired by natural or rural landscapes that conceal ways of life and cultures in peril of extinction.

Since storytelling began, narratives of getting lost in the woods or of choosing to live in the heterotopian space of the woods have remained popular and are, at the time of writing, experiencing a new revival. The theory of ecopsychology supplies a productive paradigm for understanding mental well-being in a cultural landscape suffused with reimaginings of nature as ‘unspoiled wilderness’. The eco-psychopathologies presented in the essays in this volume range in origin from medieval literature to contemporary films and online games. The classic romantic or gothic trope of getting lost in the forest, but also its recreational function (forest-bathing) reflect mental states humans develop when they step into the culturally constructed entity of the woodland. These ecocritical analyses present different facets of such encounters.

Through the burgeoning fields of Posthumanities and Environmental Humanities, this edition examines the changing conception of human subjectivity, agency, and citizenship as shaped by the dynamic interplays between nature, technology, science, and culture. The proposed ‘symbiotic turn’, (the awareness of the multitude of interactions and mutual interdependencies among humans, non-humans and their environment) aspires to explore the complex recompositions of the “human” in the 21st century. By organizing and promoting interdisciplinary dialogue at multiple levels, both in theory and practice, Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies is suggested as a new narrative about the biosphere and technosphere, which is embodied literarily, philosophically, and artistically.The contributions to this volume emphasize interactive, symbiotic relationships between species, disrupting both anthropocentric and biocentric paradigms and positioning symbiosis as the planet’s vital ecological process. Offering a range of ecocritical and philosophical perspectives, this book provides a valuable introduction to major branches of the environmental humanities such as posthumanism and new materialism but also new directions in Gaia theory, neocybernetics and AI, Anthropocene studies, and other contested and cutting-edge topics. What emerges most prominently from these chapters, for me, is the case for decentering humanity in the discussion of ecological topics, while still recognizing powerful impact of human technologies. I find the combination of textual criticism and critical theory to be a graceful pairing in this book, and the essays are well written and accessible. (Scott Slovic, Oregon Research Institute, coeditor of «Nature and Literary Studies»)

One of the most important drivers of the Anthropocene was a radical shift in what and how people eat. Industrial agriculture and meat production, new ways of processing, packaging, and distributing food, and the globalization of culinary habits not only upended traditional lifeways around the world but also continue to play a key role in climate change, biodiversity loss, and various other processes that are transforming the Earth system – now rendering food production increasingly precarious. Nowhere have these changes been more dramatic or consequential than in Asia.The essays in this volume examine how literary works from the Asian continent have responded to the profound changes in the region’s foodscapes. They cover poetry, prose fiction, and literary non-fiction from China, India, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan.