Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism

This presentation examines the relationship between adventure sports, masculinity, and nature. My research focuses on how cultural assumptions of masculinity pertain to how male adventure athletes’ nature relationship is represented in contemporary media and consumer marketing and in the ways male adventure athletes themselves describe their nature relationships. In my analysis of the subject I will use both ecocritical theory and theory on masculinities. This combination forms an ecomasculine viewpoint into the subject. My research material consists of contemporary media such as blogs, websites, and adventure films where adventure athletes engage in mountain sports such as mountain climbing, mountain running and ski mountaineering. All of these variations of mountain sports share common elements of danger, need of physical endurance, and the location: mountains. I will discuss, among other things, how a cultural male/female dichotomy extends to how male athletes’ relationship to nature is represented in contemporary media.
______________________________________________________________________KEY WORDS: Adventure Sports, Ecocriticism, Ecomasculinity, Masculinity, Nature

Print version of PhD Thesis.

This practice-based project investigates modalities of performing eco-aesthetic assemblages across the modern nature―culture divide. Assemblages are here understood as non-hierarchical associations between bodies that are different amongst themselves. I argue that eco-aesthetic practices that work towards naturalcultural assemblages contribute to the wider field of ecological thought and cultural understanding of the nonhuman environment or nature.

The research uses a transversal practico-theoretical approach that, following posthumanist and neomaterialist elaborations of ontology and epistemology, creates a ‘material-discursive entanglement’ (Barad, 2007) of bodies and concepts. In this posthuman continuum of practice, I argue that eco-aesthetics is an ethico-political disposition of fostering relations of accountability and responsibility with the bodies implicated in performance, especially the nonhumans understood to be minorities in the current politico-economic organisation.

The research is situated within the landscape of modern biopolitics, which is understood as a set of conceptual and material strategies of appropriation of life through the ‘logic of colonisation’ (Plumwood, 1993). Situated naturalcultural performances enact a different modality of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with the world, by creating and maintaining fields in which life is seen as a force of generative difference.

The dissertation is divided in three parts which correspond to three entangled modes of performing research. The first part is a critical ontology which individuates operative modalities of modern boundary-making techniques. This part also outlines an alternative landscape of art and philosophy which go beyond binary thinking. The second part, through a posthumanist reconfiguration of the concept of assemblage from Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, and apparatus, in the work of Michel Foucault and Karen Barad, shapes an analytics for locating possibilities of material-discursive reconfiguration of the existing power relations. The third part follows the narrative of my artistic projects that sought to create naturalcultural performances with plants, trees, molecules of carbon-dioxide, sheep, and earth. This material-discursive entanglement of critique, analytics and performance as artistic practice together shapes a posthuman ecological praxis that is oriented towards naturalcultural justice.

AVAILABLE ONLINE:
http://minoritarianecologi.es/

Brenda Hillman’s 2018 collection, ​Extra Hidden Life Among the Days​, is rich with many
lives—bacterial, human, arboreal, fungal. A multi-media, mycelial entanglement of elegies, personal photographs, and journal meditations, Hillman’s linguistic materials take the viewer from her family’s home in Tucson to the White House Lawn, weaving contemporary political struggles into her own observations of human-nature relationships, as well as the agency of forests and lichen. How might one describe Hillman’s work? To simply call it ‘ecopoetics’ does not do her experimental storytelling justice. Rather, we might better understand Hillman’s reconfiguration of Romantic, timeless environmental writing into a timely, expansive bio-cultural ecology as ‘political-pastoral,’ a type of poetic writing that embraces humanity’s impact on landscapes, that imbues the natural world with political symbolism.

This essay examines the visual and written cultures of grizzly eradication and settler violence in U.S. California. In addition to unpacking the ways that settlers transformed the California Grizzly into a gendered symbol of imperial domination, this piece analyzes the ways that public discourse about the untamed outdoors worked to frame Native nations and wild grizzlies as threats to a properly domesticated and commercially productive U.S. California.

      The interview was mainly conducted at Tallinn University in January 2019, when Stacy Alaimo visited the Graduate Winter School “The Humanities and Posthumanities: New Ways of Being Human” and gave a plenary lecture titled “Onto-epistemologies for the Anthropocene, or Who will be the Subject of the Posthumanities?”, and completed in spring 2020, to address immediately unfolding issues.          Alaimo is an internationally recognized scholar of American literature, ecocultural theory, environmental humanities, science studies, gender theory, and new materialism. She is the author of three monographs on environmental theory and ecocultural studies: Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell University Press, 2000); Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana University Press, 2010); and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).  Alaimo has edited and co-edited essay col...

Angela Carter (1940-1992) and Lorna Crozier (1948) are two examples of contemporary writers who dedicate part of their work to problematizing historically established constructs that undermine the agency of both nature and women. Carter’s and Crozier’s agenda is, thus, in line with ecofeminist tenets, which are based on the interconnectedness of all living things on a non-hierarchical level. The intention of this article is to conduct a contrastive analysis of Crozier’s and Carter’s retelling of the account of Leda and the swan originally described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 AD) and later in W.B. Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan” (1928). We contend that both Carter’s and Crozier’s versions of the myth challenge patriarchal domination by giving voice to and empowering Leda, the young female character in the myth. This empowerment is closely associated to Leda’s harmonization with the natural world, since, by going back to nature, the young Ledas in Carter’s and Crozier’s works come to terms with their adolescent bodies in order to become women stripped of restrictive cultural and social beliefs. Accordingly, the original meaning of the figure of the swan is also subverted to adopt connotations more in tune with the creation of a sense of community that challenge the powerful enclosed violence that Ovid and Yeats attributed to this animal by presenting it as Zeus in disguise.

This paper is a study of the Indigenous literatures of Australia and Canada. As Indigenous writings reflect the symbiosis of nature and culture, an important aspect of Indigenous people is that they try to return to nature to receive Indigenous spirituality that has its roots in harmony among all beings. These writings based on nature-centred thoughts, belief system, traditional patterns, spirituality and cultural practices, environmental knowledge and respect, change and catastrophe, and dependence on nature and natural resources have been studied as presented in some relevant texts.

How do cinematic portrayals of the weather reflect and affect our experience of the world? While weatherly predictability and surprise can impact our daily experience, the history of cinema attests to the stylistic and narrative significance of snow, rain, wind, sunshine, clouds, and skies. Through analysis of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love, Kristi McKim calls our attention to the ways that we read our atmospheres both within and beyond the movies.

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens on time, whether for tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends).

Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. This first book-length study of such a meteorological and cinematic affinity casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring.

Using film theory, history, formalist/phenomenological analysis, and eco-criticism, this book casts cinema as weather, insofar as our skies and screens become readable through our interpretation of changing phenomena.

In an era when many businesses have come under scrutiny for their environmental impact, the film industry has for the most part escaped criticism and regulation. Its practices are more diffuse; its final product, less tangible; and Hollywood has adopted public-relations strategies that portray it as environmentally conscious. In Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret, Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences.

Bringing together environmental humanities, science communication, and social ethics, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is a pathbreaking consideration of the film industry’s environmental impact that examines how our cultural prioritization of spectacle has distracted us from its material consequences and natural-resource use. Vaughan examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how popular screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world. He recounts the production histories of major blockbusters—Gone with the Wind, Singin’ in the Rain, Twister, and Avatar—situating them in the contexts of the development of the film industry, popular environmentalism, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan interweaves details of the hidden environmental consequences of specific filmmaking practices, from water use to server farms, within a larger critical portrait of social perceptions and valuations of the natural world.

Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art
Routledge, 2020

Editors: Lisa Blackmore and Liliana Gómez
With contributions from Lisa Blackmore, Liliana Gómez, Adriana Johnson,  Rory O’Bryen, Gina McDaniel Tarver, Giuliana Borea & Rember Yahuarcani, Esther Moñivas, Irene Depetris Chauvin, Elizabeth DeLoughrey & Tatiana Flores, Paul Merchant, Sophie Halart.

Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Art is a new interdisciplinary volume that brings into dialogue research on how different fluids and bodies of water are mobilised as liquid ecologies in the arts. Examining the visual arts, including multimedia installations, performance, photography, and film, the chapters place diverse fluids and systems of flow in art historical, ecocritical, and cultural analytical contexts. The contributions address a wide range of phenomena, probing the historical and political, cultural and environmental impacts of colonisation, urbanisation, and industrialisation in Latin America and the Caribbean through analyses of multimedia installations, performance, photography, film, poetry and testimony. Together, they address critical genealogies of liquids and fluidity, and analyse aesthetic interventions that mobilize and recreate different fluids and flows to restage their absence, scarcity, vital materiality, and to rethink the relationships between periphery and metropolis, and their related forms of knowledge and knowledge practices. The book thus traces cultural histories and analyses of hydrological and hydraulic projects centred on the engineering of bodies of water and consider shifts in their semantic, sensorial, and social orders amid contexts of political and environmental violence and conflict. The dynamic movements of liquid run through this book in configurations and situations that reframe liquids and fluidity never as pure, abstract flow, but as contingent instances of contamination, overflow, counterflow, stasis, vortex, and reflux.

The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, environmental humanities, ecological humanities, blue humanities, ecocriticism, Latin American studies, and island studies.

Mother earth tied to the train tracks: The scriptive implications of melodrama in climate change discourse abSTracT This article examines the way climate change narratives have mobilized melodramatic frameworks, by examining An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) as paradigmatic. It engages with recent scholarship that recuperates melodrama from the realm of the pejorative to observe how it structures political discourse and expands on that scholarship by introducing a performance studies methodology to examine how melodrama offers the broad outlines of a script that the would-be hero is asked to improvise within. The essay examines the tropes of melodrama – which include Manichaean dichotomies of good and evil, the implication that suffering is a marker of virtue, and the imperative of a dialectic of pathos and action – in order to analyse their implications for the potential to solve the impending tragedy of devastating climate change. This essay engages in close readings of performances struc-tured by generic scriptive discourse to argue that, for climate change activists, the forms that environmental narratives take, may communicate as much as the content of those narratives.

The chapter focuses on the ways in which Hollywood films have represented the material and emotional dimensions of nuclear risk and on how these representations engage viewers. James Bridges’s The China Syndrome and Mike Nichols’s Silkwood both frame their representation of risk as suspense-driven political thrillers and in both cases the fictional drama is heightened by the films’ relationships to real-world risks and events. While the invisibility of radiation raises representational problems, both films use their viewers’ preexisting risk perceptions to engage them in plotlines that are driven by the anticipation of catastrophes rather than by the catastrophes themselves. By telling melodramatic stories about courageous individuals who struggle to uncover the truth about nuclear risk, argues Weik von Mossner, the films not only illustrate Ulrich Beck’s claim that the determination of risk is a form of ethics; they also demonstrate that emotional processes such as fear are vital components of ethical decision making in the face of unpredictable material agencies and the environmental risks they pose.

Yuk King Tan’s video Limits of Visibility (2012) transports the viewer to the bay of Hong Kong and the cargo area where a tonnage of paper (the perpetual waste, even in the digital age) is compacted into modular cubes, stacked and waiting to be craned onto long barges. Tan asserts that the ‘material is prepared to become another kind of vast colony [see plate 11]. Sent to less developed countries [to be] further broken down and salvaged, the waste material is a literal paper trail about the scale, power and wastage of economic development and trade.’

Ecopoetry is a type of poetry that uses a powerful ecological stress or message. If we examine ecopoetry included in ecocriticism subject, we can see the difference between nature poetry and ecological poetry in many ways when we consider nature and eco writing. Considering the diversity it contains, it is hard to fit ecopoetry into a single meaning, but the definition of the American poet Juliana Spahr gives us an idea.  In her book, Well Then There Now, Juliana Spahr defines ecopoetry and its associate with ecopoetics tradition as "a systematic analysis of the distinctions between nature and culture." According to her, based on ecopoetry, it is fed by many dualisms such as natural, cultural, material discursive and is based on an abstractive narrative. For example, while ecopoetry depicts a bird on the tree, it does not mention the bulldozer that will destroy the bird's habitat soon. Or it does not mention where the same bird emigrated from there and how it interacted with the ecosystem in which it lives.

Historians have noted that male bureaucrats and natural resource experts tended to dominate early twentieth-century national and hemispheric conservationist movements in Latin America, but a constellation of female activists, notably Gabriela Mistral, strengthened conservationism in the cultural sphere.  Capitalizing on her leadership in Pan-Americanism, transnational feminist networks, and cutting-edge teaching, Mistral functioned throughout her career as an advocate for conservationism, gendering the natural environment in strategically essentialist ways.  Important tropes throughout her poetry, Nature and Mother Earth became specific themes in Mistral’s journalistic prose.  Here Mistral blended conservationism with anti-imperialism, arguing that Mother Earth was threatened both by man’s failure to care for her and by predatory imperialists. Environmental stewardship also played a central role in her Pan-American initiatives and complimented the “official” Pan-American Conservation Movement of the inter-war period.  Mistral’s de facto ecofeminism is echoed in Latin American women’s writing of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, suggesting that Nature represented an alternate sphere for women beyond the urban manifestations of modernization.  The gathering of female voices around the gendered image of Mother Nature also represents a corpus of early environmental prophets in Latin American letters and culture.

This book examines literary representations of human and non-human animality in British Romanticism, a period in which scientific, political, and industrial revolutions radically transformed the status of the human and redefined the concept of species. Its novel approach lies in its focus on the role that aesthetic taste played in the Romantic understanding of the animal. Concentrating on the discourses of the sublime, the beautiful, and the ugly, Heymans argues that the Romantics’ aesthetic views of animality influenced and were influenced by their moral, scientific, political, and theological judgment. He shows how feelings of environmental alienation and disgust played a positive moral role in animal rights poetry, why ugliness presented such a major problem for Romantic-period scientists and theologians, and how in political writings the violent yet awe-inspiring power of exotic species came to symbolize the beauty and terror of the French Revolution. Linking the works of Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Byron, the Shelleys, Erasmus Darwin, and William Paley to the theories of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, this book reveals the importance of animality in the Romantic imagination as well as the crucial role of the aesthetic in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century conceptions of species. Its wide-ranging investigation of the problematic relationship between beauty, truth, morality, and biology brings an original and fascinating perspective to the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and literature and science studies.

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415507301/


CONTENTS


Introduction: The Aesthetics of Species


Part 1

1. The Environmental Ethics of Alienation: The Ecological Sublime
2. Green Masochism: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
3. Hunting for Pleasure: Wordsworth’s Ecofeminism


Part 2

4. Humans and Other Moving Things: Wordsworth Visits London (with Deleuze and Guattari)
5. The Cute and the Cruel: Taste, Animality and Sexual Violence in Burke and Blake
6. A Problem of Waste Management: Frankenstein and the Visual Order of Things


Part 3

7. Revelation, Reason, Ridicule: The Scientific Sublime
8. A Taste of God: Natural Theology and the Aesthetics of Intelligent Design
9. Beauty with a Past: Evolutionary Aesthetics in Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature""

In this paper, I posit a theoretical intersection that may seem counterintuitive on the surface, but through my analysis and interrogations, I hope to illuminate how each school of theory seems made to fit into the other. I will disclose my theoretical base first before I establish the history, major postulates, and cinematic purpose for each theory separately and finally move into a section of synthesis in which I intend to reveal the ways that each theory informs the other, forging a new body of work over my theoretical base. Ultimately, I will propose and validate a new, hybrid school of theory that hopefully has incredible potential in application with film. I claim a mode of analysis engaged with the queer ecosemiotics of film. What I call a queer ecosemiotic theory draws on cognitivist, cultural, and semiotic approaches to film. I work from the bases established by New Queer Cinema and ecocinema, each bursting out of the 1990s, as well as the writings of thinkers like Richard Dyer, Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Christian Metz, Maureen Turim, and Nicole Seymour.

Con lenguaje claro e ilustraciones evocadoras, este libro nos ofrece las claves de un pensamiento contemporáneo emergente. ¿Qué es el ecofeminismo? ¿Cómo ha surgido y evolucionado? ¿Qué nos dice con respecto a nuestros cuerpos y nuestra sexualidad? ¿Cómo cultivar una ética del cuidado en la vida cotidiana, la ciencia y la tecnología? ¿Qué características debe tener una Educación Ambiental ecofeminista? ¿Es la violencia hacia los animales una práctica patriarcal? ¿Cómo se transforman las identidades de género gracias a las nuevas formas de sensibilidad y conciencia hacia los animales? Estas son algunas de las preguntas que encuentran respuesta en esta obra innovadora.
A diferencia de algunas formas de ecofeminismo que insisten en las capacidades de cuidado  de las mujeres, olvidando sus reivindicaciones, o rechazan los derechos sexuales y reproductivos conquistados por el feminismo, o se preocupan exclusivamente por el ecosistema sin atender al sufrimiento animal, Alicia H. Puleo _pensadora de referencia en el ecofeminismo_  nos invita a imaginar y proyectar un mundo de igualdad y de paz con la Naturaleza, un mundo sin explotación humana o animal y en el que la diversidad no sea motivo de opresión. El placer y la amistad del Jardín-Huerto de la escuela epicúrea sirven de inspiración para un  Jardín-Huerto ecofeminista en esta obra ilustrada por la artista hipermedia ecofeminista Verónica Perales. Verde y rebelde, libre y lleno de vida, sus caminos soleados y sus senderos umbríos nos permiten pensar un futuro más justo y feliz.

Hispanic Ecocriticism finds a rich soil in the main topics of environmental concern in the literature of Latin America and Spain, not only as a source for renewing critical analysis and hermeneutics, but also for the benefit of global environmental awareness. In a renewed exchange of transatlantic relationships, Hispanic Ecocriticism intermingles Latin American ecocritical issues of interest — the oil industry; contamination of forests and rivers; urban ecologies; African, Andean, and Amazonian biocultural ecosystems — with those of interest in Spain — animal rights and the ecological footprints of human activity in contemporary narratives of eco-science fiction, in dystopias, and in literature inspired by natural or rural landscapes that conceal ways of life and cultures in peril of extinction.

In her novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) Karen Tei Yamashita deploys magical realist narrative technique to offer a globally-embracing ecocritical criticism that unfolds global connectivity of peoples, places, and their destinies. As such, she uses a deterritorialized environmental approach, which favors eco-cosmopolitanism over bioregionalism, drawing our attention to the shortcomings of locally-based ecocritical studies that overlook the inextricable political, social, and cultural connections between the local and the global in an age of unprecedented mobility and global modernity. Another environmental issue Yamashati sheds light upon is the fact of slow violence, a violence, as Rob Nixon argues, appears out of sight, and over time. To render this invisible violence visible, she employs magical realism. The intersection between magical realism and ecocriticism in Through the Arc fuels a representational void by giving shape not only to the insidious workings of global capitalism masquerading as "scientific development," and/or "progress" but also to the slow, invisible environmental violence whose long-term effects bring about human and environmental cost. In her novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) Karen Tei Yamashita deploys magical realist narrative technique to offer a globally-based ecocritical criticism that unfolds global connectivity of peoples, places, and their destinies. As such, she uses a deterritorialized environmental approach which reveals the indispensable link between the local/the national and the global that leads to the loosening of ties between culture and geography. Yamashita favors eco-cosmopolitanism over bioregionalism drawing our attention to the shortcomings of locally-based ecocritical studies, namely bioregionalism, which overlooks the inextricable political, social, and cultural connections between the local and the global in an age of unprecedented mobility and global modernity. Magical realist elements in the novel not only uncover the seamless link between the local and the global but also the slow violence, a violence, as Rob Nixon argues, appears out of sight, and over time. The intersection between magical realism and ecocriticism in Through the Arc fuels a representational void by giving shape not only to the insidious workings of global capitalism masquerading as "scientific development," and/or "progress" but also to the slow, invisible environmental violence whose long-term effects bring about human and environmental cost. Furthermore, Yamashita's

This paper sheds light on a squat biography of Virginia Woolf the indefatigable ecofeminist introduces the core subject. Woolf influenced by the green fuse and ecofeminism perception. Her novels are not only providing us great pleasure in evoking all our five senses, but also induce our spirit to safeguard the nature of our forthcoming generations. Centering the viewer’s attention on the green philosophy of life, they lead their audience to believe that nature as the relieving tool to resolve all the wounds and capture all the things in a sort of good old memories. Her novels are portraits of nature with infinitesimal observance.

Global capitalism and its ongoing demand for ever more oil render life in the Niger Delta precarious. Exploitative conditions and ecological devastation are repeatedly resisted by activists in the Niger Delta, as well as by writers of diasporic ecocritical literature. This essay focuses on two short stories by Nnedi Okorafor, representing critical African-futurist cultures of resistance to oil’s local and global devastations. Set in rural Niger Delta communities, “Spider the Artist” and “The Popular Mechanic” locate the petroviolence of the Niger Delta within global circuits of petroleum production and consumption by focusing on the pipeline in all its networked visibility and materiality. These stories center local pipelines, connecting them to the global supply chain of oil consumption. Okorafor’s use of the speculative enables both a critical view of global oil’s predations, and irruptions of African-centered feminist agency and futurity. These two stories present female protagonists who confront the violent environments of their petroleum-ravaged communities, and craft modes of resistance, pleasure, and possibility. If the pipeline is a metonym for the global web of petromodernity, Okorafor’s fiction hacks the pipeline.

Bessie Head's first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, is perhaps one of her most ethico-political narratives to examine the introduction of modern capitalism and patriarchal science against the haunting spectral of traditional tribal systems in pre-Independence Botswana. Set in Golema Mmidi, which ironically translates to "grow crops," Head provides a detailed historical trajectory of how the imposition of agribusiness development projects onto traditional pastoral livelihoods devoured traditional tribal structures and ecosystems. In this essay, I examine how the implementation of modernized agricultural technology supplanted the collective relationship of subsistence farming, kinship systems, and cattle herding. I argue that When Rain Clouds Gather offers an interdisciplinary space for probing ecologies of pain in which scientific agribusiness projects have violently separated humanity from nature and rendered 63 percent of the Botswana's population food insecure.

Monografia w języku polskim, która ukazała się w Wydawnictwie Naukowym "Śląsk" w 2016 roku.

Spis treści:
Wstęp do ekokrytyki  17
Zagadnienia i problemy badawcze ekokrytyki  19
Przegląd polskich stanowisk wobec problematyki ekologicznej w literaturze  52
Redefiniowanie realizmu i nowe możliwości interpretacyjne  86
Niemota przyrody a realizm (post)traumatyczny  94
Słaby ludzki podmiot – miejsce na język przyrody 119
Realność ekosystemu w Placówce Prusa  121
Niezdara Dygasińskiego i sprawstwo przyrody  139
Dziecięce pomiędzy: Świat i ślepa dziewczyna Dygasińskiego oraz  Suka Reymonta  155
Nie-ludzki rodowód poezji: Leśmian  176
Splot historii i zagrożenia: głos drzew w Glorii victis Orzeszkowej  195 Zwierzęta – podmioty (nie)obecne 207
Człowiek i zwierzę – problem granicy w Dziennikach Gombrowicza  209 Ujarzmianie bestii? Walka byków Sienkiewicza  222
Relacje: Wilk, psy i ludzie Dygasińskiego  239
Próba reprezentowania zwierząt: Ostatnie historie i pisarstwo Tokarczuk  256
Moja przyjaciółka krowa – wspólne doświadczenia.  Hartwig i Brach-Czaina  272
Posthumanizm i znaczenie zwierzęcych narracji w literaturze  286 Zookrytyka i zoonarracje. Oczy tygrysa Czyżewskiego  314

This is the Draft Table of Contents for my forthcoming book (Lexington--hopefully December 2016): Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse.

I post it here to give my readers--for whom I'm tremendously grateful--a preview of the book's themes and argument.

نظرية ادبي بوم‌نقد بر مطالعة (بينارشته‌اي) ادبيات و ‌زيست‌بوم در ارتباط با يكديگر تأكيد دارد. اين مقاله درآمدي است بر پيشينه، فرايند پيدايش و شكل‌گيري، مباني و روش‌شناسي بوم‌نقد. در آغاز، پس از بیان پيشينه‌اي كوتاه، روند و علل ظهور اين نظريه در نيمة دوم سده‌ی بيستم بررسي مي‌شود. پس از آن، تعاريف بوم‌‌نقد از ديدگاه صاحب‌نظران مختلف بازگو می‌شود. در بخش دیگری از مقاله، موقعيت رويكردهاي گوناگون بر طيف بوم‌نقد بين دو منتهای ساخت‌گرايانه و واقع‌گرايانه مورد بررسي قرار می‌گیرد. در ادامه، به چند نمونه از روش‌شناسي‌هاي بوم‌‌نقد پرداخته می‌‌شود. سرانجام، بعد از اشاره‌اي مختصر به بوم‌فمنيسم و عدالت زيست‌محيطي، واژه‌نامه‌اي كاربردي و منابعي براي مطالعة بيشتر معرفي مي‌شود.

واژه‌های کلیدی: بوم‌نقد، ساخت‌گرايي، واقع‌گرايي، طبيعت، محيط ‌زيست.

This paper investigates the extent to which Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Indian literature as a whole, addresses the challenge of ecocriticism’s attempt to preserve India’s dying ecological crisis. The novel nostalgically discusses possible dimensions from which Rushdie reconnects readers with the once beautiful environment in order to suggest alternatives that may inspire a nation’s caring for its fast dying environment. Given that ecocriticism attempts to link and synthesize literary criticism and the environment by examining the various ecological crises in eco-literary discourses, this paper discusses possible axioms where conceptual problems can be raised, and suggests the need for an expansive ecological representation in literary discourses. The attempts to preserve the physical environment and paintings depicting eco-heritage suggest a green politic of national eco-consciousness. Such heritage conservation and preservation in literature reveals Rushdie’s composite vision of the future of the methods of living, habitation and habitats across geographical boundaries. Rushdie’s green politics which interrogates the role of literature in the discourse of the environment re-echoes artistic postcoloniality as an alternative view that requires the participation of everyone in conserving the degrading environment.
Keywords: nation, ecocriticism, eco-consciousness, green politics, heritage

A Sensory and Eco-feminist perspective on Nature Therapy

Through ecofeminism this thesis seeks to evoke both the body, and nature, in new relationships with both - through shift in perceptions and thinking. The material world, and the body, is often overlooked and marginalised as insignificant in the theories of western psychology and sociology. The body/nature and the dichotomy of the mind/human intervenes with the ecological problems of the world. In search for knowledge and creation of sustainable relationships with nature, the thesis looks to the therapeutic practice and research field of nature therapy and garden therapy. These practices I understand to carry the winds burden of different modes of perceptions and interaction with nature. While I attempt to extract knowledge towards a sustainable relationship in the human/non-human interaction, I also seek to contribute to the field of research in nature therapy whit a psychological phenomenological approach. The research field is primarily from clinical epidemiology and landscape architecture. The contribution I create through the thesis, is a multisensory phenomenological view and description of the practice that re-thinks embodiment and emplacement. This is rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty´s philosophy, where the body is the center for perception while in constant intentional interaction with the world. Both his phenomenology of the body, and the ecofeminism, has a gap in between their theoretical philosophies to the methodological research practice. They lack embodiment and operationalization, which I attempt to solve by ambiguities contribution of theory and methodological development that focuses on the bodily knowledge, the sensory interaction, and research methods that interweave the body, environment and the scientist. The subject of the scientist and the object of the research, as well as the nature/culture and theory/practise are considered to be entangled to the purpose of dissolving the dichotomised thinking. The subject of the researcher is situated and visible through the method autoethnography, that clarify pre-understanding and also allows the micro-phenomenology of the sensed relationship to nature. The text simultaneously experiments with poetic language to open the readers sensuousness. The analysis of the thesis clarifies nature therapy as bodily interaction, that consists of ways to inhabit and elect the “room” that regulates rhythms. This happens mainly through mirroring and analogies in language that builds bond between the outside environment, and the inside. These interactions create new concept of language from the bodily language and point towards moments of fusion in the relation and experience of nature, when in multisensory and mindful exploration.