This is precisely what we've talked so much about in class already--
If there's no "nature," what is there?
Where does this leave your generation?
Read below. If you think it might be interesting to write for this purpose and on this topic, then use the final paper assignment in this class to do so, and we can work together on revising it.
Here are the details:
Call for Submissions:
Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age after the End of Nature
“When the wind and the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, …
man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw.” ~ Henry Beston
We are seeking essays, poetry, or fiction by writers age 30 and under
for a literary anthology exploring changing human relationships with
the natural world. What are the challenges, fears, dreams, and sources
of resilience of young writers—“Cosmic Outlaws” who have grown up on a
fundamentally changing planet?
Submission Guidelines:
• Essays and short fiction up to 4,000 words
• Up to 3 poems
• Include your name, address, e-address and phone number and a brief
bio with all submissions
Deadline: December 31, 2012
Send submissions to both:
Julie Dunlap juliejdunlap@earthlink.net /6371 Tinted Hill/Columbia, MD
21045
and
Susan A. Cohen sacohen3@aacc.edu/40 Johnson Road/Pasadena, MD 21122
Thank you for your help in forwarding this call for submissions to your
undergraduate and graduate students, colleagues, and friends.
Peace, Susan
Greg Garrard’s Ecoctitcism opens with an introduction to the terminology and areas of focus involved in ecocriticism, then dives into a genealogical analysis of ‘pollution’ through an ecocritical lens. The point most stressed and explicated as the “basic propositions of the book” (16), is that the techniques and vocabulary involved in ecocriticism are derived from both cultural as well as scientific studies. While never applying the term in the text, Garrard describes what could be called a ‘feedback loop’ in each of the three chapters that I read. The feedback loop is a process by which the understanding of a concept affects the relationship to it, which then creates changed means by which to understand it and therefore changed ways of relating to it and so on. For example, the use of the term pollution by Sir Francis Bacon gave to this term applicability to the mechanism of the universe outside of the human, this fundamentally changed the way the term pollution was understood, and therefore the way it was related to and dealt with through scientific discourse and cultural affairs. Now the term has seen so much cultural translation that it is hard to know what piece of baggage one is referring to by using the word pollution.
ReplyDeleteBeginning with Biblical understandings of ‘wilderness’, Chapter 4 moves through another ecocritical concept with the genealogical method. The Romantics were very much influenced by wilderness, while simultaneously influencing what wilderness meant. ‘The Sublime’ – being a moment of sheer beauty touched by terror – was a common means of relating to wilderness for the Romantics. The chapter moves on towards Thoreau and Muir, then Aldo Leopold and more contemporary ecology. Finally the chapter arrives at Gary Snyder’s prose, poetry, ethics and wild deep ecology.
Chapter 7, on Animals, touches on a diversity of authors and consepts. Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian notion of ‘speciesism’ pretty well cuts down the Cartesian ethos of privileging rationality. Posthumanism is brought up to conclude the chapter, bringing in authors like Donna Haraway and the concept of cyborgs. In the postsecular age, technology and globalization have pretty well made cyborgs out of all of us – we are a multiplicity of material and cultural technologies and inheritances.