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Current debates in the environmental humanities, animal studies, and related fields increasingly revolve around this question: What to do with “the human”? Is the human a category worth preserving? Should it be replaced with the post-human? Should marginalized and minoritarian groups advocate for a universal humanism? What is the relationship between humanism and anthropocentrism? Is a genuinely non-anthropocentric mode of thinking and living possible for human beings? This book argues that the writings of twentieth-century poet Robinson Jeffers offer twenty-first-century readers a number of crucial insights concerning such questions and timely advice about how not to be human. For Jeffe...
The first collection in twenty years of essays on Robinson Jeffers, one of the great American poets of the twentieth century, this work signals the sea change in Jeffers scholarship, as well as the increasing breadth and depth of criticism of the literature of the American West. The essays assembled here highlight issues and theories critical to Jeffers studies, among them the advance of ecocriticism, the reimagining of regionalism as place studies, the continuing development of cultural studies and the new historicism, the increasingly poignant vector of science and literature, the new formalism, particularly as it pertains to narrative verse, and the glaring omission of feminist analysis in Jeffers scholarship. Jeffers has always appealed to a wider audience than many twentieth-century poets, and this book will speak to that general readership as well as to scholars and students.
The human impulse to religion--the drive to explain the world, humans, and humans’ place in the universe – can be seen to encompass environmentalism as an offshoot of the secular, material faith in human reason and power that dominates modern society. Faith in Nature traces the history of environmentalism--and its moral thrust--from its roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism through the Progressive Era to the present. Drawing astonishing parallels between religion and environmentalism, the book examines the passion of the movement’s adherents and enemies alike, its concern with the moral conduct of daily life, and its attempt to answer fundamental questions about the underlying ord...
A narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose, Kevin Starr's acclaimed multi-volume Americans and the California Dream is an unparalleled work of cultural history. In this volume, Starr covers the crucial postwar period--1950 to 1963--when the California we know today first burst into prominence. Starr brilliantly illuminates the dominant economic, social, and cultural forces in California in these pivotal years. In a powerful blend of telling events, colorful personalities, and insightful analyses, Starr examines such issues as the overnight creation of the postwar California suburb, the rise of Los Angeles as Super City, the reluctant emergence of ...
On September 13, 2012, Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco turned fifty. Mixing wilderness, history, and agriculture, Point Reyes is a hybrid park unlike any other in America. An Island in Time traces the triumph of its creation, the rescue effort that saved it from early abandonment, and its frequent identity crises since. Sixty images by regional photographers make it clear why people care. Celebrating what has been accomplished in half a century at Point Reyes, Hart takes a clear-eyed look at the several (and ongoing) arguments about what this remarkable piece of land should ultimately be. The nationally noted debate about the fate of a historic oyster farm within the park takes its place as the latest in a series of struggles to define the terms. In 1962, Harold Gilliam's classic book Island in Time: The Point Reyes Peninsula helped complete the drive to create the National Seashore. In 2012, An Island in Time: 50 Years of Point Reyes National Seashore tells the rest of the story-and illuminates the choices now at hand.
This book details the dramatic history of the weaponization of avant-garde art as propaganda, from its violent origins selling the idealistic communism of revolutionary France to its use as an American weapon wielded against the Nazi and Soviet threat as World War II began. It shows how art became ammunition in the war of ideas as the protagonists of the Second World War attempted to control the minds of their people. The text highlights how the avant-garde was the battlefield for the epic struggle between collectivism and American individualism, and will appeal to the reader with an interest in vivid stories of art, history, and politics.
The first three volumes of this four-volume work will present chronologically all of Jeffers' published work from 1920 to 1963. Jeffers' publishers sometimes adjusted his punctuation, presumably to bring the poems' punctuation into accord with grammatical convention. The texts for this edition revert to Jeffers' own preferences, insofar as the best methods of modern textual editing can reveal them.
Inherit the Holy Mountain puts religion at the center of the history of American environmentalism rather than at its margins, demonstrating how religion provided environmentalists with content, direction, and tone for the environmental causes they espoused.
Healing the Split consists of the collected essays of poet, literary critic and philosopher Marc Elihu Hofstadter. The essays stretch from Hofstadter's early scholarly articles about poets William Carlos Williams and Yves Bonnefoy through articles published in the Redwood Coast Review about poetry, art, music, science, politics and France to recent articles concerning the "split" between the sciences and the humanities, reason and feeling/intuition/faith. The book embodies Hofstadter's consistent belief in the idea that all human activities are composed of an "objective" element and a "subjective" element. Human knowledge, whether scientific, mathematical, philosophical or artistic, contains...
Jeffers' Country -- Nature's highway -- Big Sur: utopia, U.S.A.? -- Open-space at continent's end -- The influence of the counter-culture, community, and State -- The "battle" for Big Sur, or debating the national environmental ethic -- Defining the value of California's coastline -- Epilogue: millionaires and beaches: the socio-political economics of California coastal preservation in the twenty-first century