Affective Ecocriticism

Affective Ecocriticism

Emotion, Embodiment, Environment

Edited by Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino

360 pages
9 photographs, index

Paperback

November 2018

978-1-4962-0756-2

$35.00 Add to Cart
Hardcover

November 2018

978-1-4962-0679-4

$60.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)

November 2018

978-1-4962-0856-9

$35.00 Add to Cart
about author bio praise table of contents media awards

About the Book

Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies.

These interdisciplinary essays model a range of approaches to emotion and affect in considering a variety of primary texts, including short story collections, films, poetry, curricular programs, and contentious geopolitical locales such as Canada’s Tar Sands. Several chapters deal skeptically with familiar environmentalist affects like love, hope, resilience, and optimism; others consider what are often understood as negative emotions, such as anxiety, disappointment, and homesickness—all with an eye toward reinvigorating or reconsidering their utility for the environmental humanities and environmentalism. Affective Ecocriticism offers an accessible approach to this theoretical intersection that will speak to readers across multiple disciplinary and geographic locations.
 

Author Bio

Kyle Bladow is an assistant professor of Native American studies at Northland College. Jennifer Ladino is an associate professor of English at the University of Idaho. She is the author of Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature.
 

Praise

“Affective Ecocriticism cements the importance of affect—and not only data or narrative—to understanding current environmental crises and relations. It also posits how affect bears on acting on these crises (or not) and pivoting our relations. That is, the essays here aren’t merely descriptive or diagnostic; they also look to possibilities for response.”—Heather Houser, associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

“Affect theory and ecocriticism are both already vibrant fields of inquiry, but Affective Ecocriticism makes a strong case for their inherent compatibility. This field-defining book demonstrates the deeper ground that both of these approaches might find were they to understand the basic fact of their shared concerns, methods, and aims.”—Rachel Greenwald Smith, associate professor of English at Saint Louis University and author of Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations    
Acknowledgments    
Toward an Affective Ecocriticism: Placing Feeling in the Anthropocene    
Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino

Part 1. Theoretical Foundations
1. “what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere”: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety    
Nicole M. Merola
2. From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress: A Cognitive Approach to Love in the Anthropocene    
Alexa Weik von Mossner
3. A New Gentleness: Affective Ficto-Regionality    
Neil Campbell

Part 2. Affective Attachments: Land, Bodies, Justice
4. Feeling the Fires of Climate Change: Land Affect in Canada’s Tar Sands    
Jobb Arnold
5. Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn    
William Major
6. A Hunger for Words: Food Affects and Embodied Ideology    
Tom Hertweck
7. Uncanny Homesickness and War: Loss of Affect, Loss of Place, and Reworlding in Redeployment    
Ryan Hediger

Part 3. Animality: Feeling Species and Boundaries
8. Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud    
Robert Azzarello
9. Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene    
Brian Deyo
10. Futurity without Optimism: Detaching from Anthropocentrism and Grieving Our Fathers in Beasts of the Southern Wild    
Allyse Knox-Russell

Part 4. Environmentalist Killjoys: Politics and Pedagogy
11. The Queerness of Environmental Affect    
Nicole Seymour
12. Feeling Let Down: Affect, Environmentalism, and the Power of Negative Thinking    
Lisa Ottum
13. Feeling Depleted: Ecocinema and the Atmospherics of Affect    
Graig Uhlin
14. Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Undergraduate Environmental Studies Curricula    
Sarah Jaquette Ray
List of Contributors    
Index    
 

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