Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a threshold concept

Description

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localized or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the “Anthropocene”, which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet’s ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver. Cover Half Title Also Available from Bloomsbury Title Copyright Dedication Contents List of illustrations Acknowledgements Preface CHAPTER ONE The Anthropocene – questions of definition The overview effect ‘We are as Gods? No, for we have created the power but not the mind’18 A global imaginary? Summary CHAPTER TWO Imaging and imagining the whole Earth: The terrestrial as norm Implications The phantasm of normality: Terrestriality and John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ CHAPTER THREE Emergent unreadability: Rereading a lyric by Gary Snyder Historical contextualizing Spatial containment: Methodological nationalism Conceptions of nature and the transcorporeal Biological contexts: The fire ape Emergence and anachrony Conclusion CHAPTER FOUR Scale framing Scale effects Scale framing Scale framing as miniaturization: Two cases Overpopulation Literary representations of overpopulation CHAPTER FIVE Scale framing: A reading ‘Petro-minimalist realism’ Some implications Ecophobia? CHAPTER SIX Postcolonial ecocriticism and de-humanizing reading: An Australian test case Setting up a reading experiment First reading Second reading Conclusion CHAPTER SEVEN Anthropocene disorder CHAPTER EIGHT Denial: A reading CHAPTER NINE The tragedy that climate change is not ‘interesting’ The Anthropocene as threshold to a new phase of art? Some questions Conclusion Bibliography Index