Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"
Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment imagines fresh critical responses to the problem of altered landscapes and the human costs of ongoing environmental trauma. . . . It asks us to imagine a broader spectrum of emotional possibility and to reevaluate those feelings already in our activist toolkit."—William V. Lombardi,
Environmental History"Beyond critiquing the cultural logic of a human-dominated geologic interval and all that comes with it, the environmental humanities can offer a clearer sense of the Anthropocene’s ecological affects. In articulating scholarly versions of such emotional attunements,
Affective Ecocriticism represents an exciting, ground-breaking vision of how such a project might proceed."—Andrew Ross,
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"These essays, diverse in method, topic, and style, show that an affective ecocriticism offers numerous tools for understanding our present moment and imagining new futures."—Shelby Brewster, H-Environment
"This volume provides a refreshingly sophisticated approach for integrating the interdisciplinary field of affect theory with ecocritical analysis."—Patrick D. Murphy,
Western American Literature“
Affective Ecocriticism cements the importance of affect—and not only data or narrative—to understanding current environmental crises and relations. It also posits how affect bears on acting on these crises (or not) and pivoting our relations. That is, the essays here aren’t merely descriptive or diagnostic; they also look to possibilities for response.”—Heather Houser, associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of
Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect“Affect theory and ecocriticism are both already vibrant fields of inquiry, but
Affective Ecocriticism makes a strong case for their inherent compatibility. This field-defining book demonstrates the deeper ground that both of these approaches might find were they to understand the basic fact of their shared concerns, methods, and aims.”—Rachel Greenwald Smith, associate professor of English at Saint Louis University and author of
Affect and American Literature in the Age of NeoliberalismTable of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene
Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino
Part 1. Theoretical Foundations
1. “what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere”: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety
Nicole M. Merola
2. From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene
Alexa Weik von Mossner
3. A New Gentleness: Affective Ficto-Regionality
Neil Campbell
Part 2. Affective Attachments: Land, Bodies, Justice
4. Feeling the Fires of Climate Change: Land Affect in Canada’s Tar Sands
Jobb Arnold
5. Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn
William Major
6. A Hunger for Words: Food Affects and Embodied Ideology
Tom Hertweck
7. Uncanny Homesickness and War: Loss of Affect, Loss of Place, and Reworlding in Redeployment
Ryan Hediger
Part 3. Animality: Feeling Species and Boundaries
8. Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud
Robert Azzarello
9. Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene
Brian Deyo
10. Futurity without Optimism: Detaching from Anthropocentrism and Grieving Our Fathers in Beasts of the Southern Wild
Allyse Knox-Russell
Part 4. Environmentalist Killjoys: Politics and Pedagogy
11. The Queerness of Environmental Affect
Nicole Seymour
12. Feeling Let Down: Affect, Environmentalism, and the Power of Negative Thinking
Lisa Ottum
13. Feeling Depleted: Ecocinema and the Atmospherics of Affect
Graig Uhlin
14. Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula
Sarah Jaquette Ray
List of Contributors
Index
