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The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures retraces the “nature of hatred” and the “hatred of nature” from the earliest traditions of Western literature including Biblical texts, Medieval Spanish literature, early Spanish Renaissance texts, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iberian and Latin American literatures. The nature of hate is neither hate in its weakened form, as in disliking or loving less, nor hate in its righteous form, as in “I hate hatred,” rather hate in its primal form as told and conveyed in so many culturally influential Bible stories that are at the root of hatred as it manifests itself today. The hatred of nature is not only contemp...
More than thirty thousand people were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983, leaving behind a cultural landscape fractured by absence, denial, impunity, and gaps in knowledge. This book is about how these absences assume narrative form in late twentieth-century Argentine fiction and the formal strategies and structures authors have crafted to respond to the country's use of systematic disappearance as a mechanism of state terror. In incisive close readings of texts by Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, and Tomás Eloy Martínez, Karen Elizabeth Bishop explores how techniques of dissimulation, doubling, displacement, suspension, and embod...
Throughout the centuries philosophers and poets alike have defended an essential difference—rather than a porous transition—between the human and animal. Attempts to assign essential properties to humans (e.g., language, reason, or morality) often reflected ulterior aims to defend a privileged position for humans.. This book shifts the traditional anthropocentric focus of philosophy and literature by combining the questions “What is human?” and “What is animal?” What makes this collection unique is that it fills a lacuna in critical animal studies and the growing field of ecocriticism. It is the first collection that establishes a productive encounter between philosophical perspectives on the human–animal boundary and those that draw on fictional literature. The objective is to establish a dialogue between those disciplines with the goal of expanding the imaginative scope of human-animal relationships. The contributions thus do not only trace and deconstruct the boundaries dividing humans and nonhuman animals, they also present the reader with alternative perspectives on the porous continuum and surprising reversal of what appears as human and what as nonhuman.
The commitment to participate in ecological protection has grown considerably and, in the academic world, it has been tackled primarily by the Social Sciences. The Humanities has followed suit and several books have dealt with the reasons why such commitment is essential and morally imperative. What has been crucially lacking, however, are books that propose concrete pedagogical approaches to the study of environmental issues and aim at inspiring and motivating both educators and students to become actively engaged in the pursuit of ecological preservation. It is here that this book comes into play. Faced with the polluting of the earth, the devastating effect of climate change, and the inequalities of North/South resources to counter the throes of environmental degradation, our responsibility as educators and in particular as eco-pedagogues is to engage in theoretical discourses on the subject matter but also to begin to provide practitioners in all fields with essential tools to shape an ecological sense of consciousness among future leaders of the earth: our students.
What can ecocriticism do when engaging with Japanese literature and culture? This edited volume Ecocriticism in Japan attempts to answer this question. The contributors place themselves inside the domestic fields of production of works of art and express their concerns and ideas for the English-speaking spheres of the world. Taking up subjects ranging from the eleventh-century novel The Tale of Genji, an early twentieth-century writer Taoka Reiun, the post-WWII atomic bombing literature by women, the internationally-renowned Abe Kōbō, the Nobel laureate Ōe Kenzaburō, the world-widely popular writer Murakami Haruki, the Minamata writer Ishimure Michiko, and the anime artist Miyazaki Hayao to the recent TV anime Coppelion, a production that foresaw a devastating nuclear disaster after the Great East Japan Earthquake, this volume extricates and discusses innate, complex values of Japanese people and culture in terms of nature and environment.
Nature and Literary Studies supplies a broad and accessible overview of one of the most important and contested keywords in modern literary studies. Drawing together the work of leading scholars of a variety of critical approaches, historical periods, and cultural traditions, the book examines nature's philosophical, theological, and scientific origins in literature, as well as how literary representations of this concept evolved in response to colonialism, industrialization, and new forms of scientific knowledge. Surveying nature's diverse applications in twenty-first-century literary studies and critical theory, the volume seeks to reconcile nature's ideological baggage with its fundamental role in fostering appreciation of nonhuman being and agency. Including chapters on wilderness, pastoral, gender studies, critical race theory, and digital literature, the book is a key resource for students and professors seeking to understand nature's role in the environmental humanities.
Gender and Environment in Science Fiction focuses on the variety of ways that gender and “nature” interact in science fiction films and fictions, exploring questions of different realities and posing new ones. Science fiction asks questions to propose other ways of living. It asks what if, and that question is the basis for alternative narratives of ourselves and the world we are a part of. What if humans could terraform planets? What if we could create human-nonhuman hybrids? What if artificial intelligence gains consciousness? What if we could realize kinship with other species through heightened empathy or traumatic experiences? What if we imagine a world without oil? How are race, gender, and nature interrelated? The texts analyzed in this book ask these questions and others, exploring how humans and nonhumans are connected; how nonhuman biologies can offer diverse ways to think about human sex, gender, and sexual orientation; and how interpretive strategies can subvert the messages of older films and written texts.
How water enables Caribbean and Latinx writers to reconnect to their pasts, presents, and futures. Water is often tasked with upholding division through the imposition of geopolitical borders. We see this in the construction of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo on the US-Mexico border, as well as in how the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean are used to delineate the limits of US territory. In stark contrast to this divisive view, Afro-diasporic religions conceive of water as a place of connection; it is where spiritual entities and ancestors reside, and where knowledge awaits. Departing from the premise that water encourages confluence through the sustainment of contradiction, Channeling Knowledge...
Narratives of Environmental Challenges in Brazil and India: Losing Nature, edited by Zelia Bora and Murali Sivaramakrishnan, contextualizes the two subcontinents of India and Brazil and closely examines environmental issues from within and without. This collection focuses largely on the fate of forests and water in these two geographical terrains. This book explores narratives that reflect transformations: hitherto unprecedented demographic expansions, exploitation of natural resources, pollution and depletion of river and fresh water sources, uncontrollable demands on the energy front, waste and garbage disposal, drastic reduction of biodiversity. All of these are factors to research when o...
This book disrupts the quintessential assumptions of ecology, the politics of identity, and environmental destruction, while proposing new readings, interpretations, and solutions in the face of urgent environmental issues.