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Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales
Throughout his works, Thomas Pynchon uses various animal characters to narrate fables that are vital to postmodernism and ecocriticism. Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales: Fables for Ecocriticism examines case studies of animal representation in Pynchon’s texts, such as alligators in the sewer in V.; the alligator purse in Bleeding Edge; dolphins in the Miami Seaquarium in The Crying of Lot 49; dodoes, pigs, and octopuses in Gravity’s Rainbow; Bigfoot and Godzilla in Vineland and Inherent Vice; and preternatural dogs and mythical worms in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day. Through this exploration, Keita Hatooka illuminates how radically and imaginatively the legendary novelist depicts his empathy for nonhuman beings. Furthermore, by conducting a comparative study of Pynchon’s narratives and his contemporary documentarians and thinkers, Thomas Pynchon’s Animal Tales leads readers to draw great lessons from the fables, which stimulate our ecocritical thought for tomorrow.
Intermedial Ecocriticism
Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis Through Art and Media provides an extensive understanding of the climate crisis as it is represented in a number of medial forms, including scientific reports, popular science, graphic novels, documentaries, websites, feature films, and advertising. Theoretically, this is the first book that combines two important theories from the humanities: ecocriticism and intermedial studies. The book carefully develops Intermedial Ecocriticism as a method of investigating how climate crisis is represented and communicated through diverse media types. The chapters each include a comparative analysis of two or three specific media products and how they mediate the climate crisis.
Reading Cats and Dogs
Throughout the world, people spend much of their time with animal companions of various kinds, frequently with cats and dogs. What meanings do we make of these relationships? In the ecocritical collection Reading cats and Dogs, a diverse array of scholars considers the philosophy, literature, and film devoted to human relationships with companion species. In addition to illuminating famous animal stories by Beatrix Potter, Jack London, Italo Svevo, and Michael Ondaatje, readers are introduced to the dog poems of Shuntarō Tanikawa, a Turkish documentary on stray cats as neighborhood companions, and the representation of diverse animal companions in Cameroonian novels. Focusing on “Stray and Feral Companions,” “The Usefulness of Companion Animals,” and “Problematizing Companion Animals,” Reading Cats and Dogs aims both to confirm and topple readers’ assumptions about the fellow travelers with whom we share our lives, our streets and fields, and our planet. Fifteen contributors from various countries reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and psychological complexities of our multispecies relationships, demonstrating the richness of ecocritical animal studies.
Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India
Ecodisaster Imaginaries in India: Essays in Critical Perspectives is a volume of critical essays that discuss and debate the literary and cultural representations of ecological/environmental disaster in India from the perspectives that are integral to postcolonial disaster studies and the environmental humanities. The essays offer theoretically informed readings of environmental fiction, nonfiction, and poetry among other contemporary literary genres that open our eyes to today’s burning issues of global warming, climate change, pollution of air and water bodies, deforestation, and species extinction. The volume addresses the staunch ecological consciousness reflected in Rabindranath Tagore’s writings from the early twentieth century, indigenous responses to ecodisaster, and the portrayal of ecodisaster in selected Indian movies which raise questions of human rights violations in the face of manmade disaster and environmental crisis.
The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest
The Animal Other in Narratives of Conquest: Uncanny Encounters investigates the functions of nonhuman animal imagery in diverse narratives of the Conquest of the Americas. The author's explications of film, poetry, literary and popular fiction, and theme park spaces draw on postcolonial and animal theory, deconstructive and Freudian literary criticism, and radical social theory. She argues that animals in these texts function on two levels: while they play a key role in the development of both Indigenous and European characters, depictions of their treatment and symbolic charge consistently work to disrupt narratives that seek to present the Conquest as a mutually beneficial "encounter" between two cultures. The close readings of animal imagery in texts ranging from Pablo Neruda's poetry to the animated film The Road to El Dorado represent a fresh approach to questions surrounding the depictions of Indigenous Americans and the motivations, tactics, and lasting contributions of the invading culture.
“From Faraway California”
Offering a transdisciplinary journey across Thomas Pynchon’s California trilogy, “From Faraway California” addresses the representation of (city)space in the Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice through “geourban” lenses. Drawing on specific concepts in urban and regional studies, the book provides a thorough examination of Pynchon’s spatial imaginary, where the reader comes to understand how his fiction tackles the socio-political and cultural consequences of urban restructuring in the contemporary city and the lives of its citizens. Pynchon’s depiction of California is further analyzed from mythical and environmental standpoints to shed light on his planetary vision and (post)postmodernist poetics in the span of nearly half a century. More broadly, the book’s geocritical and urban analyses of Pynchon’s fiction indicate what might take place concerning the future of urbanism, toward “planetary urbanization” and the formation of the “city region.”
The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature
In The Human-Animal Relationship in Pre-Modern Turkish Literature: A Study of The Book of Dede Korkut and The Masnavi, Book I, II, Dilek Bulut Sarikaya explores medieval Anatolia, where humans' connectivity to nonhuman animals was not yet disrupted by the capitalist economic systems and demonstrates how ancient societies treated nonhuman animals as self-conscious, spiritual individuals, capable of feeling pain with highly advanced forms of intentionality.
Literature After Fukushima
Literature after Fukushima examines how aesthetic representation contributes to a critical understanding of the 3.11 triple disaster – the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Through an examination of key works in the expanding corpus of 3.11 literature the book explores how the disaster—both its immediate aftereffects and its continued unfolding—reframed discourse in various areas such as trauma studies, eco-criticism, regional identity, food safety, civil society, and beyond. Individual chapters discuss aspects of these perspectival shifts, tracing the reshaping of Japanese identity after the triple disaster. The ...
The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism
The Nonhuman in American Literary Naturalism responds to a need to expand and refine the connections among nonhuman studies and American literary naturalism and to productively expand the scholarly discourse surrounding this vital movement in American literary history. This collection focuses on that which becomes visible when the human subject is skirted, or moved off-center: in other words, the representation of nonhuman animals and other vital or inert species, things, entities, cityscapes and seascapes, that play an important part in American literary naturalism. Informed by animal studies, ecocriticism, posthumanism, new materialism, and other recent theoretical perspectives, the essays in this collection discuss early naturalist texts as well as more recent naturalistic-oriented authors.
Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism in the Victorian Gothic, 1837–1871
Nicole C. Dittmer offers a reimagining of the popular Gothic female “monster” figure in early-to-mid-Victorian literature. Regardless of the extensive scholarship concerning monstrosities, these pre-fin-de-siècle figurations have often been neglected by critical studies or interpreted as fragments of mind and body which create a division between culture and nature. In Monstrous Women and Ecofeminism, Dittmer deploys monism to delineate from and contest such dualism, unifies the material-immaterial aspects of fictional women, and blurs the distinction between nature-culture. Blending intertextual disciplines of medical sciences, ecofeminism, and fiction, she exposes female monstrosities as material and semiotic figurations. This book, then, identifies how women in the Victorian Gothic are informed by the entanglement of both immaterial discourses and material conditions. When repressed by social customs, the monistic mind-body of the material-semiotic figure reacts to and disrupts processes of ontology, transforming women into “wild” and “monstrous” (re)presentations.
