The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature

Author(s):  
Alok Amatya
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wenzel

The introduction situates world literature and the Anthropocene as instances of broader dynamics of world-imagining and a recent shift toward the global as a scale of analysis. It offers an expanded narrative of globalization, by looking back to moments of capitalist expansion that precede neoliberalism and by recognizing the environment (particularly in colonial peripheries) as globalization’s material condition of possibility as well as its product. Describing the book’s interdisciplinary approach to cultural imagining and environmental crisis, the introduction shows how understandings of nature are mediated by literary tropes and narrative forms and genres in way that precede and exceed representation in any particular text; cultural logics shape what counts as nature or crisis. Therefore, a facility with the literary is broadly relevant to environmental thought and action, and the purview of ecocriticism ranges far beyond texts explicitly “about” the environment. The introduction argues for legibility (not visibility) as the goal of analysis: under what conditions can environmental injustice be read, understood, and apprehended? A reading of Robert Kaplan’s “The Coming Anarchy” and Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” demonstrates the limitations of eco-apocalypse as a mode of imagining futurity, which tends to ignore histories of imperialism and inequality that shape the present.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Aitana Martos García

Se defiende la necesidad de elaborar lecturas transversales con la educación medioambiental, literaria y del patrimonio, como ejes que sirvan para afrontar retos derivados de la crisis ambiental y de la pérdida de memoria cultural en los estudiantes y ciudadanos en general. Se examinan estas cuestiones a propósito de la cultura del agua como centro de interés, y se proponen criterios para la elaboración de un nuevo canon inclusivo, relativo a textos de literatura universal, con base en lecturas ecológicas. A tenor de estas prioridades, se describe la posible articulación de los ejes de conciencia ambiental, patrimonio cultural tangible e intangible, y la metodología didáctica más útil para promover lectores disidentes, que deseen poner en valor la cultura del agua propia de cada comunidad. Todo ello en consonancia con las nuevas corrientes educativas y culturales y en beneficio de la educación del ciudadano del siglo XXI. This article argues in favor of developing readings at the crossroads of environmental, literary and heritage educations. These will be the axis proposed to address challenges arising from the environmental crisis and the loss of cultural memory in students and citizens in general. These issues are explored especially in relation to the emblematic problem of water culture. We propose some criteria for the development of a new inclusive ecological canon with world literature texts. Based on these priorities, we describe the possible foundations of environmental awareness, of tangible and intangible cultural heritage and of the most useful teaching methods to promote dissident readers who wish to foster water culture within specific communities. All this is in keeping with new educational and cultural currents and seeks to have a positive impact on the education of 21st century citizens.


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