Search results for ""author phillip john usher""

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

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The Tragedy of Pious Antigone (1580) is the first English-language translation of Robert Garnier’s Antigone, ou la Pieté. Written by France’s earliest career tragedian, who also worked in the Paris Parliament and as a counselor at a judicial tribunal in the town of Le Mans, the play draws on various classical sources (especially Seneca, Statius, and Sophocles) to retell the well-known story of a family torn apart by war: as brothers Eteocles and Polynices fight to the death, their sister Antigone and mother Jocasta make repeated calls for peace. Originally published at the height of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) that pitted Catholics and Protestants against each other, the five acts of Garnier’s play would have had immediate resonance. Neither extolling nor defending one side or the other, this humanist tragedy, which also anticipates the style of Corneille and Racine, could have been appreciated not only by members of one religious community or the other, but by both as a seemingly non-partisan and earnest lamentation about, and reflection upon, troubled times. This famous story, re-imagined by countless authors including Bertolt Brecht, Jean Anouilh, Griselda Gambaro, Athol Fugard, and many others, is here re-told to emphasize empowered female voices in times of political division.

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