Description
Book SynopsisJeffrey Jerome Cohen reminds us in Stone, that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion. Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics and invites us to apprehend the world both in geological time and in other than human terms.
Trade Review"A poignant and poetic book, Stone is a provocative contribution to anthropocene studies. Rather than naming humans as agents endowed with geologic force, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen contemplates our anxious collaboration with lithic matter that outlasts and eludes us. Stone is a must-read for anyone interested in rethinking the anthropocene within the geologic turn in literary and cultural studies."
—Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon
"If our historic engagement with stone is the story of cave painting, toolmaking, and home building, Cohen wants to recover a secret history that moves beyond such utilitarian domination. His version is about collaboration and gregarious commingling between humans and stones."—Los Angeles Review of Books
"A gorgeous lovesong to lithic form, narrative endurance, and the urgent need to connect."—The Bookfish:Thalassology, Shakespeare, and Swimming
"Rendered eloquently, Cohen’s text is a useful attempt at crafting a unique theoretical framework for challenging assumptions about the differences between humans and nature."—CHOICE
"Ranging between the poetic and the pedantic, heroically imagining beyond its academic constraints, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman presents a unique history that is central to some of our most urgent ecological concerns."—The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada
"An elegantly structured, stylistically-rich study in theory and criticism."—SubStance
"Stone is a beautifully written book that moves from scholarly engagement with medieval texts to more contemporary issues and ideas, as well as a deal of personal material, and etymological musings."—The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
"Jeffrey Jerome Cohen offers a poetically charged account of stone as uncannily lively substance, the necessary ground for any articulation of ecological (and ethical) figures."—Symploke 24
"a profound exploration of a fascinating topic, one that helps me in my own thinking on ecology and materiality, and one that may well stand the test of lithic time."—KronoScope
"Renders a usually inanimate and unchanging world both vivid and vibrant."—Environmental History
Table of ContentsContents
Introduction: Stories of Stone
Geophilia: The Love of Stone
Excursus: The Weight of the Past
Time: The Insistence of Stone
Excursus: A Heart Unknown
Force: The Adventure of Stone
Excursus: Geologic
Soul: The Life of Stone
Afterword: Iceland
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
