Affective Ecocriticism

Emotion, Embodiment, Environment

Kyle Bladow, Jennifer Ladino

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781496206794
• eBook ISBN: 9781496208569
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Social Sciences

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.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Toward an Affective Ecocriticism
• Part 1
• 1. “what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere”:
• 2. From Nostalgic Longing to Solastalgic Distress
• 3. A New Gentleness
• Part 2
• 4. Feeling the Fires of Climate Change
• 5. Wendell Berry and the Affective Turn
• 6. A Hunger for Words
• 7. Uncanny Homesickness and War
• Part 3
• 8. Desiring Species with Darwin and Freud
• 9. Tragedy, Ecophobia, and Animality in the Anthropocene
• 10. Futurity without Optimism
• Part 4
• 11. The Queerness of Environmental Affect
• 12. Feeling Let Down
• 13. Feeling Depleted
• 14. Coming of Age at the End of the World
• List of Contributors
• Index
• About Kyle Bladow
• About Jennifer Ladino