Ecocriticism on the Edge The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept

by Clark, Timothy

• ISBN13: 9781472506481
• ISBN10: 1472506480
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-09-24
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged.

Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the “Anthropocene”, which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.

Author Biography

Timothy Clark is Professor of English at the University of Durham, UK. His previous publications include The Poetics of Singularity (2005) and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (2010).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Anthropocene as a Literary-Historical Category
Part I: Eco-criticism and Anachronism
1. Scale Framing
2. The Flight Into Anachronistic Models of the Political
Part II: Green Deconstruction - Readings and Issues
3. Supplementing Derrida
4. Derangements of Scale
5. Meaning and Nonsense
6. Earth as a Whole, Mars
7. Interdisciplinarity and the SSSM
8. Agency
9. Automobility
10. Animism, the Pathetic Fallacy: Can A Book Feel Pain?
11. Crises of Authority
Conclusion: Green Deconstruction
Bibliography
Index