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Ecocultural Ethics

Author: Rayson K. Alex
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498532489
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
The book offers twelve cases of ethics relating to ecology and culture. The twelve cases presented in the twelve essays, are written by eminent scholars from India, USA, Canada and Egypt. Employing various ecocritical frameworks, the writers have tried to understand/analyse literary, cinematic and other cultural texts and contexts. The volume argues that the principles of ethics are as dynamic as culture and nature. Any ecological perspectives/issues/conditions cannot be separated from their cultural contexts and thus need a culture-specific scrutiny to understand the ethics of ecoculture.

Anthropocene Ecologies of Food

Author: Simon C. Estok
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000576345
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Anthropocene Ecologies of Food provides a detailed exploration of cross-cultural aspects of food production, culinary practices, and their ecological underpinning in culture. The authors draw connections between humans and the entire process of global food production, focusing on the broad implications these processes have within the geographical and cultural context of India. Each chapter analyzes and critiques existing agricultural/food practices, and representations of aspects of food through various media (such as film, literature, and new media) as they relate to global issues generally and Indian contexts specifically, correcting the omission of analyses focused on the Global South in virtually all of the work that has been done on "Anthropocene ecologies of food." This unique volume employs an ecocritical framework that connects food with the land, in physical and virtual communities, and the book as a whole interrogates the meanings and implications of the Anthropocene itself.

Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication

Author: Scott Slovic
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351682709
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse examples of practical applications of environmental communication and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars, communication studies specialists, environmental historians, practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers, sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their discussions on key issues in textual representations of human–nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental humanities.

Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity

Author: Tema Milstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351068822
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. The editors introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries: Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes. Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality. Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities. Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere. Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division.

The Human–Animal Boundary

Author: Mario Wenning
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 149855783X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
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.

Fallen Animals

Author: Zohar Hadromi-Allouche
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498543979
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The premise of Fallen Animals is that some how and in some way The Fall of Adam and Eve as related in the Bible has affected all living beings from the largest to the smallest, from the oldest to the youngest, regardless of gender and geography. The movement from the blissful arena of the Garden of Eden to the uncertain reality of exile altered in an overt or nuanced fashion the attitudes, perceptions, and consciousness of animals and humanity alike. Interpretations of these reformulations as well as the original story of the Paradise Garden have been told and retold for millennia in a variety of cultural contexts, languages, societies, and religious environments. Throughout all those retellings, animals have been a constant presence positively and negatively, actively and passively, from the creation of birds, fish, and mammals to the agency of the serpent in the Fall narrative. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is but one example of the ambivalence which has characterized the human-animal relationship over the centuries, both across, and within, cultures, societies and traditions. The book examines the interpretations, functions and interactions of the Fall — physical, moral, artistic and otherwise — as represented through animals, or through human-animal interactions.

The Horse in Literature and Film

Author: Francisco LaRubia-Prado
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498534929
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Horses serve as central characters in great literary works that span ages and cultures. But why? In The Horse in Literature and Film: Uncovering a Transcultural Paradigm, Francisco LaRubia-Prado, Ph.D. explores the deep symbolic meaning, cultural significance, and projective power that these magnificent animals carry in literature, film, and the human psyche. Examining iconic texts and films from the Middle Ages to the present—and from Western and Eastern cultural traditions—this book reveals how horses, as timeless symbols of nature, bring harmony to unbalanced situations. Regardless of how disrupted human lives become, whether through the suffering caused by the atrocities of war, or the wrestling of individuals and society with issues of authenticity, horses offer an antidote firmly rooted in nature. The Horse in Literature and Film is a book for our time. After an introduction to the field of animal studies, it analyzes celebrated works by authors and film directors such as Leo Tolstoy, Heinrich von Kleist, D.H. Lawrence, Akira Kurosawa, John Huston, Girish Karnad, Michael Morpurgo, and Benedikt Erlingsson. Exploring issues such as power, the boundaries between justice and the law, the meaning of love and home, the significance of cultural belonging, and the consequences of misguided nationalism, this book demonstrates the far-reaching consequences of human disconnection from nature, and the role of the horse in individual and societal healing.

Victorian Ecocriticism

Author: Dewey W. Hall
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498551076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Victorian Ecocriticism: The Politics of Place and Early Environmental Justice aims to take up the challenge that Lawrence Buell lays out in The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005). Buell decries: “For in order to bring ‘environmental justice into ecocriticism,’ a few more articles or conference sessions won’t suffice. There must be ‘a fundamental rethinking and reworking of the field as a whole’” (Buell 113). While discussions about nature conservation and preservation have been important within the context of ecocriticism, Buell asserts that the holy grail for the field is actually how literary critics engage in discourse about questions of place as space humanized for the purpose of tracing, disclosing, and advancing the important issue of environmental justice—as it applies to human beings, animals, and plants. The “fundamental reworking” or shift in the field of Victorian Studies really has to do with the dearth of ecocritical publishing about seminal authors and literary texts. Victorian Ecocriticism aims to participate in filling that vacuum, lack, or lacuna by featuring current research about the Victorian era from an ecocritical perspective. Victorian Ecocriticism hopes to identify, establish, and organize its content based on six themes: Ecocrisis, Ecofeminism, Ecogothicism, Ecohistoricism, Ecotheology, and Ecological Interdependence. The edited collection, thus, has two aims. First, selected places among others featured in the edition will provide environmental contexts, often with political implications: American rural landscape (e.g., Walden Pond), Australian mines, British hill-country, metropolis, mill towns, the sea, and the woods. Second, the edition includes discussions about various instances of early environmental justice evident during the mid-nineteenth century such as, but not limited to: anti-railway campaigns, biological egalitarianism, labor disputes due to adverse working conditions, patterns of displacement, reactions to Victorian scientism, resistance to enclosure, and working class education. Victorian Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary edition. It focuses on Victorian literature as the foundational discipline linked to various disciplines such as ecology, evolutionary biology, natural history, and soil science. The topics are wide-ranging, significant, and contemporary discussing the politics of place as well as early environmental justice.

Bhopal's Ecological Gothic

Author: Pramod K. Nayar
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498540465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
The book studies the cultural texts—fiction, protest effigies, photographs, films, reportage, eyewitness accounts, campaign posters and reports—produced around the world’s worst industrial disaster: the Bhopal tragedy of 1984. It makes a case for an ecological Gothic, wherein the city, its landscape and its people are Gothicized. After tracing the history of the disaster as a history of negligence, the book proceeds in later chapters to study the coverage of the events themselves by eyewitnesses and survivors, and the remnants, in various forms, of the disaster – the haunting – within human bodies and nature. Finally, it examines the industrial ruins and the mobilization of protests against Union Carbide.

Facing Relativism

Author: Alyssa Luboff
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030433412
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
This book tackles the difficult task of defending relativism in the age of science. It succeeds where others have failed by combining the rigor of analytic philosophy with the first-hand insights of anthropological experience. Typically, an anthropologist’s work on relativism offers rich examples of cultural diversity, but lacks philosophical rigor, while a philosopher’s work on relativism offers rigorous argumentation, but lacks rich anthropological examples. Facing Relativism, written by a North American philosopher who lived in the Ecuadorian rainforest, does both. Relativism at a global scale is a view that our claims about the world, both theoretical and practical, are evaluable only relative to a context shaped by factors such as culture, history, language, and environment – or, “a way of life.” It can be at once intuitive and disturbing. While we might expect a way of life to exert some influence on our claims, relativism seems to move to the overly strong conclusion that all of our claims about what is true or good must merely be expressions of cultural bias. It easily opens itself to a host of charges, including paradox and self-contradiction. Facing Relativism argues that such problems arise largely from a failure to situate the view within the context that has, throughout its long history, been its inspiration: the experience – whether through literature, the imagination, or direct anthropological contact – of deeply engaging with a very different way of life. By starting with a careful analysis of the experience of deep engagement, this book shows that relativism is neither as incoherent nor as alarming as we tend to think. In fact, it might just offer the tools we need to face these times of global crisis and change. Alyssa Luboff has produced an exceptional defense of a cultural relativism that recognizes how the epistemic and the ethical intertwine in a way of life. Drawing from her deep engagement over many years with the Chachi and traditional Afro-Ecuadorian people, she provides vivid and compelling examples of how one can come to understand another way of life as well-reasoned, coherent, and integrated, as challenging to one’s own commitments at the same time that one challenges it. Luboff combines her deep engagement with command of the relevant philosophical and anthropological literature. She presents the major arguments against relativism in a sympathetic and generous way, and carefully responds with a sophisticated relativism that acknowledges how the world resists and responds to different conceptual shapings of it. This book is beautifully written and will engage both the academic specialist and the intelligent general reader. – David Wong, Duke University By the time her brilliant faceoff is over, philosophical relativism will never again be seen as a straw man. – Richard A. Shweder, University of Chicago This book will interest readers who seek an astute account of how the pursuit of “truth” – whether relative or absolute – enters into practices of power. Luboff ’s treatment is impressive. – Michael Krausz, Bryn Mawr College and Linacre College, Oxford University