Ecocritical Aesthetics

Description

This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement.

Acknowledgements
Introduction / Peter Quigley

I. The Relevance of Beauty
1. "It is out of fashion to say so": The Language of Nature and the Rhetoric of Beauty in Robinson Jeffers / Tim Hunt
2. Thoreau's Poetics of Nature / Arnold Berleant
3. The Pout's Nest and the Painter's Eye / Frank Stewart
4. "Yet How Beautiful It Is!": Work, Ethics, and Beauty in Stegner's Angle of Repose / Tyler Nickl
5. Renaissance Aesthetics, Picturesque Beauty, the Natural Landscape: An Essay Examining the Rise and Fall of the Impulse toward Beauty / Mark Luccarelli

II. Beauty and Engagement
6. Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic of Reconnection / Greta Gaard
7. Beauty and the Body: Towards an Ecofeminist Aesthetic that Includes Loving Our Naked Selves / Janine DeBaise
8. Dystopia and Utopia in a Nuclear Landscape: Emerging Aesthetics in Satoyama / Yuki Masami
9. Know Beauty, Know Justice: Why Beauty Matters in the Classroom / ShaunAnne Tangney

III. Materiality, Transcendence, and Aesthetics
10. Nature's Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural/Cultural Realms / Serpil Oppermann
11. From the Human to the Divine: Nature in the Writings of the Tamil Poet-Saints / Cynthia J. Miller
12. Beauty as Ideological and Material Transcendence / Werner Bigell
13. Toward Sustainable Aesthetics: The Poetry of Food, Sex, Water, Architecture, and Bicycle-Riding / Scott Slovic

Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Aesthetics

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 février 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253034052
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

ECOCRITICAL AESTHETICS
ECOCRITICAL AESTHETICS
L ANGUAGE , B EAUTY, AND THE E NVIRONMENT
EDITED BY PETER QUIGLEY AND SCOTT SLOVIC
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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2018 by Indiana University Press
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ISBN 978-0-253-03210-2 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03212-6 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03211-9 (ebook)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction / Peter Quigley
Part 1. The Relevance of Beauty
1 It Is Out of Fashion to Say So : The Language of Nature and the Rhetoric of Beauty in Robinson Jeffers / Tim Hunt
2 Thoreau s Poetics of Nature / Arnold Berleant
3 The Pout s Nest and the Painter s Eye / Frank Stewart
4 Yet How Beautiful It Is! : Work, Ethics, and Beauty in Stegner s Angle of Repose / Tyler Nickl
5 Renaissance Aesthetics, Picturesque Beauty, the Natural Landscape: An Essay Examining the Rise and Fall of the Impulse toward Beauty / Mark Luccarelli
Part 2. Beauty and Engagement
6 Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic of Reconnection / Greta Gaard
7 Beauty and the Body: Toward an Ecofeminist Aesthetic That Includes Loving Our Naked Selves / Janine DeBaise
8 Dystopia and Utopia in a Nuclear Landscape: Emerging Aesthetics in Satoyama / Yuki Masami
9 Know Beauty, Know Justice: Why Beauty Matters in the Classroom / ShaunAnne Tangney
Part 3. Materiality, Transcendence, and Aesthetics
10 Nature s Colors: A Prismatic Materiality in the Natural/Cultural Realms / Serpil Oppermann
11 From the Human to the Divine: Nature in the Writings of the Tamil Poet-Saints / Cynthia J. Miller
12 Beauty as Ideological and Material Transcendence / Werner Bigell
13 Toward Sustainable Aesthetics: The Poetry of Food, Sex, Water, Architecture, and Bicycle Riding / Scott Slovic
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK ORIGINATED with a panel titled No Beauty, No Peace: Robinson Jeffers and the Politics of Beauty and Justice, which I organized for the 2012 Western Literature Association conference in Lubbock, Texas. The panel was made up of old friends and longtime Jeffers scholars: David C. Morris, David Rothman, and ShaunAnne Tangney. We had a spirited discussion with the audience following the papers, emerging from the session with a shared concern that beauty is being eclipsed in contemporary critical discourse and specifically within the environmental humanities. The four of us from the panel had lunch that day with Barry Lopez and Scott Slovic, and Barry and Scott immediately recognized that our ideas could form the basis of a meaningful book project. Back home in Hawai i, I received important support from my doctoral student Eric San George and my colleague Frank Stewart, both of whom have helped me plan this project and offered encouragement and advice during the four years it s taken to bring it to fruition.
In acknowledging those who have contributed in major ways to this volume, thanks must first go to all of the contributors to the collection. I appreciate their excellent scholarship, their patience during the editorial and publishing process, and their speedy and careful revisions of their initial manuscripts. I also wish to thank Scott Slovic for his collaborative, informed, friendly, and eclectic approach to the many voices that constitute this volume. Frankly, with his hectic travels all over the world to speak and teach, while holding down teaching and administrative duties in Idaho, I was amazed at his ability to apply studious attention to the editorial details of this project and help propel us toward publication.
Peter Quigley
University of Hawai i,
Manoa
I HAVE NEVER been blind to the beauty of the literary works I ve studied for the past several decades as an ecocritic, but until Peter Quigley and company beckoned Barry and me over to their table in Lubbock, aesthetics had always seemed a somewhat secondary or tertiary dimension of my scholarly preoccupations. Working on this project with Peter has driven home the meaning, the importance, of beauty in all of my work-it will never recede into the background again. I thank Peter for his intensity and enthusiasm, his commitment to the cause-our collaboration has been an exciting one.
Peter and I both appreciate the support of the staff at Indiana University Press and the excellent feedback from our anonymous reviewers. This project has benefited greatly from their contributions.
There is so much to worry about as we consider the prognosis for environmental protection and social justice in the coming years-but there is also much to celebrate. This book is a celebration of cultural engagement with the natural world, and it is also a recognition of how beauty in nature and beauty in human artifacts can inspire attention and activism.
Scott Slovic
University of Idaho
PERMISSIONS
W ILLIAM S TAFFORD , Maybe Alone on My Bike, Smoke s Way: Poems from Limited Editions, 1968-1981 . Originally published in the New Yorker , April 4, 1964. Copyright 1964 by William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org .
Ofelia Zepeda, B o e-a:g ma ab him g ju:k / It Is Going to Rain. Reprinted with the permission of Ofelia Zepeda.
ECOCRITICAL AESTHETICS
INTRODUCTION
PETER QUIGLEY
I N 1996, AT THE DAWN of the contemporary ecocritical enterprise, Sven Birkerts published a review of The Ecocriticism Reader in the Boston Book Review . It captured the freshness of this new field, the sense of new possibilities as well as the likelihood of some competitive elbowing: Here is yet another new frontier; a land-rush is underway; critics and thinkers are staking out their fields, their terrain. There is a bit of that excitement of origins that is found when options are still open, before the power brokers have muscled the first orthodoxies into place. Something important has been lost, however, in the inevitable jostling and elbowing that has taken place during the past two decades: a concern for beauty.
Where has interest in the study of beauty gone in ecocritical studies and in critical theory as a whole? One of the reasons Scott Slovic and I collaborated on this project was that we both agreed that, as Scott put it to me in an e-mail, the beauty of nature and the beautiful renderings of environmental ideas and experience in various media of cultural expression, both of which were among the essential motivations for those who worked to establish ecocriticism as a self-aware scholarly movement in the 1980s and 90s, quickly became subsumed among many other scholarly concerns ( Latest ). As a numerical indicator of this, I found that the ASLE Online Bibliography 2000-2010 contains twenty-seven references to justice in titles and ninety-four appearances of the word justice in the abstracts. For beauty, however, there were only six appearances in titles and twenty-four in the abstracts. Aesthetics turns up three times in titles. I strongly suspect that the upward arc for social justice in titles and abstracts has steepened since 2010 and that the mention of beauty or aesthetics has diminished. Similarly, Slovic reported that in June 2015, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) hosted at the University of Idaho what may well have been the world s largest gathering of ecocritics to date. Some 900 scholars and writers from thirty countries gathered to talk about literature and the arts in relation to such topics as fracking, global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice, queer ecologies, narrative ethics, acoustic ecologies, humor, the body, activist pedagogy, and many other ideas. Amid the throng, aesthetics was almost nowhere to be found. Only four papers mentioned aesthetics in their titles.
In our correspondence on this issue, Scott wrote that he considers aesthetics to be one of the elephants in the room at eco-conferences, something folks are aware of, thinking about, but for some reason hesitant to engage with: Scholars hesitate to invoke beauty as an intellectual mechanism for gaining traction on these [environmental] problems. Beauty often feels so private, so complacent, even decadent. I think he s right; I do, of course, think people still experience and think about beauty, but they feel restricted and prohibited due to the options our current critical methodologies allow. In our back-and-forth, I have tended to say that these limiting options have been politically strategic in design, that this erasure of beauty is purposeful, intentional, and not inadvertent. If aesthetics is mentioned at all, it is reduced to a form of social semiotics in a war of position against All Bad Things (B rub 6-7). 1 Such reductionist treatment diminishes and contorts our lived experience and our intellectual life. Like the seat in the very last row of the airplane, the window has intentionally been removed; I can t see, and it feels odd.
How did we arrive at this contorted and dismissive approach to beauty, and what has it meant for ecocriticism? It might be useful to trace some of the forces of marginalization associated with this issue. In 1985, one year before the publication of Critical Theory since 1965 , Frederick Turner was talking confidently, in Natural Classicism: Essa