Etienne S. Benson
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226706153
- eISBN:
- 9780226706320
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226706320.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Environmental History
This book is a critical history of the concept of environment from the late eighteenth century to the present. Situating key episodes of that history in their material, social, cultural, and ...
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This book is a critical history of the concept of environment from the late eighteenth century to the present. Situating key episodes of that history in their material, social, cultural, and political contexts, it makes an argument for environmental pluralism—that is, for recognizing the profound variations in the way the concept of environment has been defined and put into practice in different times and places. Adopting this pluralistic perspective, the book argues, has several benefits. First, it provides both a more accurate and a more capacious account of the history of this multifarious concept than any attempt to identify a single dominant tradition or overarching trajectory could do. Second, it helps us recognize the diversity of concepts of environment and forms of environmentalism that are emerging at the present time, many of which diverge from those associated with the modern environmental movement. The episodes discussed in the book include research at the Paris Museum of Natural History following its founding in 1793, imperial medicine in the British Caribbean, urban reform in Progressive Era Chicago, resource management and ecology from World War I to the early Cold War, consumer protection and the environmental movement in the postwar United States, and climate change science and activism since the 1970s. The book concludes by describing several promising forms of environmentalism that are emerging today, each of which defines the concept of environment and puts it into practice in its own distinctive way.Less
This book is a critical history of the concept of environment from the late eighteenth century to the present. Situating key episodes of that history in their material, social, cultural, and political contexts, it makes an argument for environmental pluralism—that is, for recognizing the profound variations in the way the concept of environment has been defined and put into practice in different times and places. Adopting this pluralistic perspective, the book argues, has several benefits. First, it provides both a more accurate and a more capacious account of the history of this multifarious concept than any attempt to identify a single dominant tradition or overarching trajectory could do. Second, it helps us recognize the diversity of concepts of environment and forms of environmentalism that are emerging at the present time, many of which diverge from those associated with the modern environmental movement. The episodes discussed in the book include research at the Paris Museum of Natural History following its founding in 1793, imperial medicine in the British Caribbean, urban reform in Progressive Era Chicago, resource management and ecology from World War I to the early Cold War, consumer protection and the environmental movement in the postwar United States, and climate change science and activism since the 1970s. The book concludes by describing several promising forms of environmentalism that are emerging today, each of which defines the concept of environment and puts it into practice in its own distinctive way.
Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226677019
- eISBN:
- 9780226677293
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226677293.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
A Different Order of Difficulty recasts the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for studies in literary modernism (and vice versa), reading Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee within the framework ...
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A Different Order of Difficulty recasts the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for studies in literary modernism (and vice versa), reading Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee within the framework of a study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and still more broadly after Wittgenstein—in light of his contemporaneous writing and recent scholarly thinking about his philosophy. Zumhagen-Yekplé argues that looking at Wittgenstein’s project in relation to literary modernism deepens our understanding of both, demonstrating the power of his methods to awaken critics and philosophers alike to how twentieth-century literature and thought are crucially motivated by three shared interwoven core commitments. These central preoccupations, which go on to shape modernism’s afterlife in contemporary fiction, arise from an attachment to oblique ethical instruction, a yearning for transfigurative change, and to a spiritually and existentially demanding order of difficulty that exceeds the multiple intellectual challenges or calls for erudition the self-consciously crafted “Big Works” of high modernism also notoriously entail. Breaking with traditional conceptions of Wittgenstein’s work that obscure his fixation on these modernist concerns, Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a literary-critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, reading the Tractatus not as the metaphysical theory it only appears to advance, but as a complex mock-theoretical, high-modernist puzzle. To look at Wittgenstein’s early text in this way is to see it as a formally revolutionary aesthetic medium for its author’s unorthodox brand of ethical instruction, crafted to engage readers in the therapeutic and transformative activity of clarification he saw as the true work of philosophy and literature.Less
A Different Order of Difficulty recasts the significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for studies in literary modernism (and vice versa), reading Kafka, Woolf, Joyce, and Coetzee within the framework of a study of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and still more broadly after Wittgenstein—in light of his contemporaneous writing and recent scholarly thinking about his philosophy. Zumhagen-Yekplé argues that looking at Wittgenstein’s project in relation to literary modernism deepens our understanding of both, demonstrating the power of his methods to awaken critics and philosophers alike to how twentieth-century literature and thought are crucially motivated by three shared interwoven core commitments. These central preoccupations, which go on to shape modernism’s afterlife in contemporary fiction, arise from an attachment to oblique ethical instruction, a yearning for transfigurative change, and to a spiritually and existentially demanding order of difficulty that exceeds the multiple intellectual challenges or calls for erudition the self-consciously crafted “Big Works” of high modernism also notoriously entail. Breaking with traditional conceptions of Wittgenstein’s work that obscure his fixation on these modernist concerns, Zumhagen-Yekplé makes a literary-critical contribution to the “resolute” program of Wittgenstein scholarship, reading the Tractatus not as the metaphysical theory it only appears to advance, but as a complex mock-theoretical, high-modernist puzzle. To look at Wittgenstein’s early text in this way is to see it as a formally revolutionary aesthetic medium for its author’s unorthodox brand of ethical instruction, crafted to engage readers in the therapeutic and transformative activity of clarification he saw as the true work of philosophy and literature.
Elizabeth A. Williams
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226692999
- eISBN:
- 9780226693187
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226693187.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
This book explores contemporary worries over eating through the lens of the history of science and medicine. It shows how appetite, once a matter of personal inclination and everyday life, from ...
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This book explores contemporary worries over eating through the lens of the history of science and medicine. It shows how appetite, once a matter of personal inclination and everyday life, from around 1750 became an object of science, something to be managed by knowledgeable experts. At the same time it traces the disturbing story of how forms of troubled eating once seen as symptomatic of many illnesses emerged as independent diseases called “eating disorders.” The study begins by examining the traditional view, upheld by physicians and philosophers for centuries, that individual appetite was the surest guide to healthy eating. It then shows how investigators in diverse disciplines began arguing that eating and digestion were processes comprehensible and manageable only by science. The study also shows that new claims about the fallibility of appetite and the necessity of scientific guidance of eating choices prompted fierce disputes between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, localists and holists, and instinctivists and anti-instinctivists, struggles over appetite and eating that have never been resolved. The author concludes that, far from solving what many called the “mystery” of appetite, centuries of research into its “normal” and “pathological” functioning have shown that appetite, like love and other deeply human realities, is extraordinarily complex and not readily susceptible to manipulation by self-styled experts. Restoring respect for appetite would help, the study concludes, to allay its proliferating discontents, the eating anxieties that beset ever more individuals in our time.Less
This book explores contemporary worries over eating through the lens of the history of science and medicine. It shows how appetite, once a matter of personal inclination and everyday life, from around 1750 became an object of science, something to be managed by knowledgeable experts. At the same time it traces the disturbing story of how forms of troubled eating once seen as symptomatic of many illnesses emerged as independent diseases called “eating disorders.” The study begins by examining the traditional view, upheld by physicians and philosophers for centuries, that individual appetite was the surest guide to healthy eating. It then shows how investigators in diverse disciplines began arguing that eating and digestion were processes comprehensible and manageable only by science. The study also shows that new claims about the fallibility of appetite and the necessity of scientific guidance of eating choices prompted fierce disputes between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, localists and holists, and instinctivists and anti-instinctivists, struggles over appetite and eating that have never been resolved. The author concludes that, far from solving what many called the “mystery” of appetite, centuries of research into its “normal” and “pathological” functioning have shown that appetite, like love and other deeply human realities, is extraordinarily complex and not readily susceptible to manipulation by self-styled experts. Restoring respect for appetite would help, the study concludes, to allay its proliferating discontents, the eating anxieties that beset ever more individuals in our time.
Thomas L. Pangle
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226642475
- eISBN:
- 9780226642505
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226642505.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
In a famous pronouncement, Cicero observes that prior to Socrates, philosophic science “dealt with number and motion, and that from which all things originate and into which they return, and studied ...
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In a famous pronouncement, Cicero observes that prior to Socrates, philosophic science “dealt with number and motion, and that from which all things originate and into which they return, and studied the size, distance between, and course of stars and of all celestial things”: it was Socrates who “was the first to call philosophy down from heaven and to set it in cities and to introduce it into the household and to compel it to inquire into life and mores and good and bad things.” Cicero follows above all the eyewitness presentation of Socrates by Xenophon, whose Socratic dialogue The Economist (Oikonomikos = “Skilled Household Manager”) Cicero translated into Latin. The aim of the present book (a sequel to The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon’s Memorabilia) is to show how the account of Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia—Xenophon’s longest and best known, but highly defensive, portrayal of Socrates—is decisively deepened as well as complemented by the three shorter writings that Xenophon devoted to portraying Socrates in action, as Socrates founded and initiated what has come to be known as political and moral philosophy.Less
In a famous pronouncement, Cicero observes that prior to Socrates, philosophic science “dealt with number and motion, and that from which all things originate and into which they return, and studied the size, distance between, and course of stars and of all celestial things”: it was Socrates who “was the first to call philosophy down from heaven and to set it in cities and to introduce it into the household and to compel it to inquire into life and mores and good and bad things.” Cicero follows above all the eyewitness presentation of Socrates by Xenophon, whose Socratic dialogue The Economist (Oikonomikos = “Skilled Household Manager”) Cicero translated into Latin. The aim of the present book (a sequel to The Socratic Way of Life: Xenophon’s Memorabilia) is to show how the account of Socrates in Xenophon’s Memorabilia—Xenophon’s longest and best known, but highly defensive, portrayal of Socrates—is decisively deepened as well as complemented by the three shorter writings that Xenophon devoted to portraying Socrates in action, as Socrates founded and initiated what has come to be known as political and moral philosophy.
Garrett Stewart
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226656564
- eISBN:
- 9780226656878
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226656878.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Recent emphasis on digital imaging in screen narrative as “post-cinematic” tends to misdirect attention. The real breakpoint comes with the “post-filmic” image: a shift in how motion pictures move ...
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Recent emphasis on digital imaging in screen narrative as “post-cinematic” tends to misdirect attention. The real breakpoint comes with the “post-filmic” image: a shift in how motion pictures move their picture elements (now, etymologically, pix-els). This shift in material substrate, with the rearview mirror it provides on film history, offers a marked point of vantage, and of fresh critical leverage, on the media archaeology of screen operation in the move from electrical to electronic process. Each operative medium—originally photochemical, now digital—discloses its own unique, and sometimes overtly showcased, impact on narrative sequence. So-called apparatus theory in the critique of classic Hollywood cinema, with its frequent psychoanalytic emphasis on the passive and gendered gaze, has lost its grip on academic discussion. But only some renewed mode of “apparatus reading” (as proposed here in two senses) can register certain manifest technical facets of the serial image so as to read, with them, the optical ironies and technological reflexes of the motivated—and motorized—screen view. Guided by accounts of projection’s illusory special effect(s) from Jean Epstein through Stanley Cavell and Christian Metz to New Media theory, the aspects of cinemachination called out in this essay range from the mirror effects noted by Weimer film commentary through the optical slapstick of American silent film to the latest pixel-busted image plane of the CGI blockbuster—with discussion always on alert for moments that, in openly channeling the possibilities of their medium, route it back through the coils of narrative inference.Less
Recent emphasis on digital imaging in screen narrative as “post-cinematic” tends to misdirect attention. The real breakpoint comes with the “post-filmic” image: a shift in how motion pictures move their picture elements (now, etymologically, pix-els). This shift in material substrate, with the rearview mirror it provides on film history, offers a marked point of vantage, and of fresh critical leverage, on the media archaeology of screen operation in the move from electrical to electronic process. Each operative medium—originally photochemical, now digital—discloses its own unique, and sometimes overtly showcased, impact on narrative sequence. So-called apparatus theory in the critique of classic Hollywood cinema, with its frequent psychoanalytic emphasis on the passive and gendered gaze, has lost its grip on academic discussion. But only some renewed mode of “apparatus reading” (as proposed here in two senses) can register certain manifest technical facets of the serial image so as to read, with them, the optical ironies and technological reflexes of the motivated—and motorized—screen view. Guided by accounts of projection’s illusory special effect(s) from Jean Epstein through Stanley Cavell and Christian Metz to New Media theory, the aspects of cinemachination called out in this essay range from the mirror effects noted by Weimer film commentary through the optical slapstick of American silent film to the latest pixel-busted image plane of the CGI blockbuster—with discussion always on alert for moments that, in openly channeling the possibilities of their medium, route it back through the coils of narrative inference.
Elisabeth S. Clemens
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226559360
- eISBN:
- 9780226670973
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226670973.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology
Civic Gifts traces how practices of reciprocity and organized mass benevolence—that is, philanthropy—have contributed to the development of novel forms of national solidarity and impressive governing ...
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Civic Gifts traces how practices of reciprocity and organized mass benevolence—that is, philanthropy—have contributed to the development of novel forms of national solidarity and impressive governing capacities in the United States, contributing even to a famously anti-statist political culture. Sociologist Elisabeth Clemens paints a picture of the US, whether as nation or as state, as a puzzle. How, she asks, did a sense of shared nationhood develop despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences among the settlers? How did a global power emerge from an often anti-statist political culture? How did some version of this collective identity come to be articulated with organized governance? With Civic Gifts, Clemens reveals that an important piece of the answer to these questions can be found in the unexpected political uses of philanthropy and the power of gifts to mobilize communities and to create solidarity among strangers.Less
Civic Gifts traces how practices of reciprocity and organized mass benevolence—that is, philanthropy—have contributed to the development of novel forms of national solidarity and impressive governing capacities in the United States, contributing even to a famously anti-statist political culture. Sociologist Elisabeth Clemens paints a picture of the US, whether as nation or as state, as a puzzle. How, she asks, did a sense of shared nationhood develop despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic differences among the settlers? How did a global power emerge from an often anti-statist political culture? How did some version of this collective identity come to be articulated with organized governance? With Civic Gifts, Clemens reveals that an important piece of the answer to these questions can be found in the unexpected political uses of philanthropy and the power of gifts to mobilize communities and to create solidarity among strangers.
Michael W. McCann and George I. Lovell
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226679877
- eISBN:
- 9780226680071
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226680071.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Employment Law
Union by Law develops a theoretically sophisticated analysis about the contradictory power of law through a historical study of Filipino American labor rights activists. Beginning with the US ...
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Union by Law develops a theoretically sophisticated analysis about the contradictory power of law through a historical study of Filipino American labor rights activists. Beginning with the US invasion of the Philippines in 1898, the study tracks the experiences of Filipino migrant workers struggling for democratic egalitarian transformation in both the Philippine homeland and the US metropole over nearly a century. The narrative history builds on four core themes. First, the analysis situates the Filipino workers’ struggles within the hierarchical context of American “racial capitalist” empire. Second, the book contends that this hierarchical order was governed not by a uniformly liberal legal system, but rather by a patchwork of liberal, repressive, and hybrid legal practices targeting different subject groups and enacted through variable administrative forms. Filipino American laborers, like other racialized imported colonial populations, were routinely subjected to repressive legal violence at work, in social life, and in politics. Third, the book chronicles copious episodes of legal rights mobilization politics enacted by several generations of Filipino union activists struggling to challenge racial, capitalist, and imperial hierarchies. A devastating Supreme Court ruling against the workers in Wards Cove v. Atonio and triumphant wrongful death civil claims against the Marcos regime in 1989 epitomize the complex fates of these campaigns. Finally, the narrative history traces the long development of a radical oppositional rights consciousness that animated the labor activists’ struggles against, with, and beyond law. The book concludes by theorizing in general terms about legal mobilization politics amidst hegemonic racial capitalist empire.Less
Union by Law develops a theoretically sophisticated analysis about the contradictory power of law through a historical study of Filipino American labor rights activists. Beginning with the US invasion of the Philippines in 1898, the study tracks the experiences of Filipino migrant workers struggling for democratic egalitarian transformation in both the Philippine homeland and the US metropole over nearly a century. The narrative history builds on four core themes. First, the analysis situates the Filipino workers’ struggles within the hierarchical context of American “racial capitalist” empire. Second, the book contends that this hierarchical order was governed not by a uniformly liberal legal system, but rather by a patchwork of liberal, repressive, and hybrid legal practices targeting different subject groups and enacted through variable administrative forms. Filipino American laborers, like other racialized imported colonial populations, were routinely subjected to repressive legal violence at work, in social life, and in politics. Third, the book chronicles copious episodes of legal rights mobilization politics enacted by several generations of Filipino union activists struggling to challenge racial, capitalist, and imperial hierarchies. A devastating Supreme Court ruling against the workers in Wards Cove v. Atonio and triumphant wrongful death civil claims against the Marcos regime in 1989 epitomize the complex fates of these campaigns. Finally, the narrative history traces the long development of a radical oppositional rights consciousness that animated the labor activists’ struggles against, with, and beyond law. The book concludes by theorizing in general terms about legal mobilization politics amidst hegemonic racial capitalist empire.
Alexander Wragge-Morley
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226680729
- eISBN:
- 9780226681054
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226681054.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in ...
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The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Aesthetic Science revises this interpretation, showing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. Seeking to obtain knowledge of the natural world through their senses, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains arising from sensory experience. The book therefore demonstrates that judgments of taste and the pleasures of aesthetic experience had a central role in the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity. It shows that scientists of the later 17th century sought to obtain consensus not only about facts, but also about the pleasures and pains arising from embodied encounters with nature. It thus concludes by calling for a new approach that pays close attention to the role of aesthetic experience in the history of science. Indeed, it argues not only that the sciences of the 17th century had a far more significant role in the emergence of aesthetics and art criticism than has so far been recognized, but also that the conceptual resources of taste and aesthetic judgment can make a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of consensus in scientific communities.Less
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Aesthetic Science revises this interpretation, showing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. Seeking to obtain knowledge of the natural world through their senses, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains arising from sensory experience. The book therefore demonstrates that judgments of taste and the pleasures of aesthetic experience had a central role in the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity. It shows that scientists of the later 17th century sought to obtain consensus not only about facts, but also about the pleasures and pains arising from embodied encounters with nature. It thus concludes by calling for a new approach that pays close attention to the role of aesthetic experience in the history of science. Indeed, it argues not only that the sciences of the 17th century had a far more significant role in the emergence of aesthetics and art criticism than has so far been recognized, but also that the conceptual resources of taste and aesthetic judgment can make a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of consensus in scientific communities.
Marianne Mason and Frances Rock (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226647654
- eISBN:
- 9780226647821
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226647821.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Sociolinguistics / Anthropological Linguistics
The Discourse of Police Interviews examines how police interviews are discursively constructed and institutionally used to investigate and prosecute crimes. This volume investigates multiple ...
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The Discourse of Police Interviews examines how police interviews are discursively constructed and institutionally used to investigate and prosecute crimes. This volume investigates multiple discursive approaches to the analysis of police-lay person exchanges. It aims to promote dialogue not only between scholars who specialize in language and the law, but also among scholars in cognate disciplines, such as linguistic anthropology, criminology, law, and sociology, to name a few. The volume explores themes including the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview methods, such as PEACE and Reid, the role of the discursive practices of institutional representatives (e.g., police officers, interpreters) in bringing about linguistic transformations, and the impact that these transformations can have on the construction and evidential quality and value of linguistic evidence. The analysis includes an examination of both oral and written data, as well as the role of metalanguage and multimodality in understanding the police interview.Less
The Discourse of Police Interviews examines how police interviews are discursively constructed and institutionally used to investigate and prosecute crimes. This volume investigates multiple discursive approaches to the analysis of police-lay person exchanges. It aims to promote dialogue not only between scholars who specialize in language and the law, but also among scholars in cognate disciplines, such as linguistic anthropology, criminology, law, and sociology, to name a few. The volume explores themes including the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview methods, such as PEACE and Reid, the role of the discursive practices of institutional representatives (e.g., police officers, interpreters) in bringing about linguistic transformations, and the impact that these transformations can have on the construction and evidential quality and value of linguistic evidence. The analysis includes an examination of both oral and written data, as well as the role of metalanguage and multimodality in understanding the police interview.
Cary Wolfe
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226687834
- eISBN:
- 9780226688022
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226688022.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This book argues that Wallace Stevens’s poetry develops increasingly sophisticated conjugations of the relationship between poetics and ecology, culminating in his late great long poem, “An Ordinary ...
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This book argues that Wallace Stevens’s poetry develops increasingly sophisticated conjugations of the relationship between poetics and ecology, culminating in his late great long poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” To understand how and why this is the case, however, we must rethink what “ecology” and “ecocriticism” mean. This book thus takes on two primary tasks: a fundamental retheorization of “ecopoetics"; and a fundamental rereading of the cumulative trajectory of one of Modernism’s most philosophically engaged figures. As regards the first task, this book uses systems theory, theoretical biology, and deconstruction to bring the critical concepts of “ecology” and “ecopoetics” up to date with contemporary work in theoretical biology. As regards the second, it offers a fundamental redescription of Stevens’s place in literary history, in particular his storied role as the main inheritor of the Romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For both lines of investigation, the inescapability and productivity of paradox is central—and a problem, Stevens shows, that poetry can handle better than philosophy. For Stevens and for theoretical biology, mind and world, organism and environment, do not describe an ontological divide; instead, they are co-implicated in a dynamic holism that is paradoxical (and deconstructed) because that relationship is different for each living thing in its “embodied enaction.” This realization necessitates a fundamentally non-representationalist understanding of ecopoetics, and it also makes it clear why the epistemological problems famously associated with Stevens’s poetry can only be solved by a shift from epistemology to ecology.Less
This book argues that Wallace Stevens’s poetry develops increasingly sophisticated conjugations of the relationship between poetics and ecology, culminating in his late great long poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” To understand how and why this is the case, however, we must rethink what “ecology” and “ecocriticism” mean. This book thus takes on two primary tasks: a fundamental retheorization of “ecopoetics"; and a fundamental rereading of the cumulative trajectory of one of Modernism’s most philosophically engaged figures. As regards the first task, this book uses systems theory, theoretical biology, and deconstruction to bring the critical concepts of “ecology” and “ecopoetics” up to date with contemporary work in theoretical biology. As regards the second, it offers a fundamental redescription of Stevens’s place in literary history, in particular his storied role as the main inheritor of the Romanticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. For both lines of investigation, the inescapability and productivity of paradox is central—and a problem, Stevens shows, that poetry can handle better than philosophy. For Stevens and for theoretical biology, mind and world, organism and environment, do not describe an ontological divide; instead, they are co-implicated in a dynamic holism that is paradoxical (and deconstructed) because that relationship is different for each living thing in its “embodied enaction.” This realization necessitates a fundamentally non-representationalist understanding of ecopoetics, and it also makes it clear why the epistemological problems famously associated with Stevens’s poetry can only be solved by a shift from epistemology to ecology.
The Aims of Higher Education
Asia First
Cartophilia
The Courtiers' Anatomists
Daguerreotypes
Demolition Means Progress
Dreamscapes of Modernity
Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict
Four Last Songs
