Close Reading the Anthropocene

Description

Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, Close Reading the Anthropocene explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Both close reading and scientific ecology prioritize slowing down and looking around to apprehend similarities and differences, to recognize and value interconnections. Here "close" suggests careful attention to both the reading subject and read "object." Moving between places, rocks, plants, animals, atmosphere, and eclipses, this interdisciplinary edited collection grounds the complex relations between text and world in the environmental humanities. The volume’s wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of contributors List of figures Acknowledgments Introduction: the unbearable closeness of reading 1 Inhabiting words, inhabiting worlds: a case for pragmatist close reading 2 Ecopoetics and the myth of motivated form 3 Assembling the archive: close(ly) reading great auk extinction with Walton Ford 4 Bartleby and the politics of measurement 5 Close reading at the end of time 6 Postcolonial anthropocene and narrative archeology in Burma Boy 7 Key west in the anthropocene: Stevens and Bishop close reading Florida 8 The tree as archive: George Nakashima and the nuclear age 9 Going underground: in defense of deep reading 10 Reading in the dark: the aura of eclipse 11 John Masefield’s “The Passing Strange”: derangements of scale 12 From scale to antagonism: reading the human in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos Index