Reading for the Planet

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-46
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wenzel
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Injustice ◽  
Material Condition ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
Looking Back ◽  
Scale Of Analysis

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.

scholarly journals Sustainable development: a narcissistic strategy to cope with the environmental crisis?

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano Kasiorowski de Araujo ◽  
Gabriela Marques Di Giulio
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Risk Society ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Social Risk ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Reflexive Modernization ◽  
Human Conduct ◽  
Symbolic Structure

Abstract This article analyzes the institutionalization of the discourse of sustainable development (SD) for more than three decades and its development as a symbolic structure that influences subjectivity and social practices in this century. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, it focuses on a debate between psychoanalysis, attentive to the ways in wich discontent is manifested, and the ideas of risk society and reflexive modernization, from social risk theory. The analysis of the SD discourse allows to frame it as a narcissistic strategy to cope with the environmental crisis. Such a strategy structures itself in the very preservation of existence at the same time that it disputes a constant process of defining which way of life populations should live and how human conduct should be guided. As a discourse that denies finitude, supported by the need for efficiency and technological development in order to avoid the end of resources, this narcissistic strategy may ultimately lay the foundation of human and environmental exhaustion.

scholarly journals Decentering of Anthropocentric Interactions and Restructuring of Ecocentric Dialogues in the Interdependence between Man and Nature through Fantasy and Fictional Narratives

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 128-140
Author(s):  
Silpa Krishnan V S ◽  
Priyanka Tresa Paul
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Environment ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Holocene ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
Cultural Ecological ◽  
Positivist Approach

Since the onset of industrialization around the year 1800, along with its growing dependence on fossil fuels, have moved us from the Holocene era and into what is now being called the Anthropocene era. Much of the meaning attributed to the human- nature interaction is anthropocentric and this has resulted in causing a disturbing dialogue between nature and man. Many authors have tried to reform anthropocentric signs into the nature-centric sign to convey environmentalist themes and signify the natural environment as independent, culturally complex, and worthy of humanity’s respect. The paper aims to elaborate on the applicability of eco semiotics in literary analysis, especially in regards to fantasy and fictional literature. With the help of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, the 2016 animation film Moana, and the 2009 sci-fi film Avatar, this paper will examine the literature concerning eco semiotics(natural symbols and their interpretation across cultural-ecological boundaries) in an effort to provide an alternative to the positivist approach inherent in much contemporary environmental thought that has contributed to the present environmental crisis (Verhagen, 2008).

Frontier, Market, and Environmental Crisis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Heber Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Environmental Destruction ◽  
Urban Waterways ◽  
Environmental Thought

This chapter discusses how a society's vision of apocalypse reflects its fundamental fears and values. The prevalence and the content of these visions suggest a number of important aspects of American environmental thought and reform. In the most obvious sense, these visions reflected a growing preoccupation with questions of nature and the fragility of civilization. Even when their worries did not reach the level of the apocalyptic, Americans talked about environmental changes—the cutting of forests and the fouling of urban waterways. Humanity was often at the mercy of nature in these stories, but at other times seemed to cause its own demise. Furthermore, these visions were warnings of social conflict as much as they were of purely environmental problems. Social antagonism frequently accompanied environmental destruction.

Decolonization of Environmental Education from the Perspective of Southern Environmental Thinking

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Patricia Noguera de Echeverri ◽  
Diana Alexandra Bernal Arias ◽  
Sergio Manuel Echeverri Noguera
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Education ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The South ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Environmental Thought ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Senses ◽  
The Way

A bet, a clamor, an algid need, to “thinking us” (as a collaborative, and reflexive thinking in a prospective way) about environmental education, or better, the environmentalization of education, in a decolonization that helps us think: How do we inhabit “this South that we are” in times of environmental crisis? Thinking us, in this environmental crisis, that is civilizatory. Thinking about it, and thinking us from an “environmental turn” (a change in the way we look at everything, far from seeing life as a resource, and far from devastating capitalism): from the environmental as an object to the environmental as deep and complex symbolic–biotic relationships between ecosystems and cultures. It is an environmental turn that recognizes the felthinking() Body-Earth (Noguera, 2012) that we are in an aesthetic, sensitive transit, in which the polyphonic voices of these lands emerge in the South Environmental Thought. Our paths are many, however. One of them that we wish to name Methodesthesis as the path of feeling, where the sensitive, the sensibility, the sense, the senses, and the sentient allow an understanding of the language of the Earth and the permanent aesthetic creations of the Earth-Nature-Life that we are, in a radical dissolution of the cognitive subject and the measurable object. It is an ontic, epistemic-ethical-aesthetic-political proposal, but above all it is an urgency, an enjoyment, a poetic flourishing of life itself, of the Earth and of us as life and land, in a decolonized southern environmental education and decolonizing that allows transitions for a more poetic dwelling in this South than we are.

Looking Back at Kinesiology’s Future: The Need for Both Focused Frogs and Visionary Birds

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
David K. Wiggins
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Physical Activity ◽  
Career Aspirations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Human Movement ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Status ◽  
Freeman Dyson ◽  
Looking Back

This essay reflects on the status of kinesiology amidst the current pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement. Utilizing the metaphor coined by mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson, I contend that the continued success of kinesiology is more plausible if we prepare more visionary birds, those with broader range and a variety of interests, to supplement the more narrowly focused frogs who currently dominate the field. Implicit in the essay is the contention that the field would benefit if it took a more interdisciplinary approach to the study of physical activity, sport, exercise, and other human movement forms as advocated by the American Kinesiology Association and individual scholars in the field. More specifically, I argue that the social sciences and humanities should be provided a more prominent place in kinesiology curriculums and serve as an academic core for all students in the field, irrespective of career aspirations and goals.

scholarly journals Lecturas ecológicas: hacia un canon de ecolecturas

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Aitana Martos García
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Cultural Memory ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Intangible Cultural Heritage ◽  
Water Culture

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.

scholarly journals Literary projection of the disintegration of Yugoslavia

Napredak ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 115-128
Author(s):  
Danica Andrejević
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Narrative Forms ◽  
History Of Literature

The research of the poetic and cultural meaning of literature from the 1990s to the present moment can, in the culturological context, be conducted within the social, historical and anthropological sphere as well as the general culture of remembrance. The literary projection of the dissolution of Yugoslavia in this case spans the last three decades of development of Serbian literature. In this paper we apply an interdisciplinary approach to interpretation, in accordance with the author's aspects. The basic theoretical framework consists of points of view of various characters who in monologues or within other narrative forms of literary discourse, articulate their position on the tragic ruptures within the state, family, being. Selected prose statements are structural-poetic and semanticaxiological messages of different authors and characters. About twenty novels of all generations of authors are included, which more or less explore the topic of the last civil war in the Balkans. The model of citation characteristic of the theme is contrasted by the varying subjective attitudes of the characters, ideologically colored or politically correct. Excerpts were selected exclusively on the basis of their literary value. Writers react more intensely, freely, and emotionally to the tragic reality and war apocalypse. Their literary projections can be classified as the engagement of critical intellectuals who neither provoked nor participated in the tragic historical events. Thus, literary discourse, however politicized or even subversive, is not political discourse in a literary text. The writers do not engage in documentary mimesis but an artistic projection of reality and the literary transformation of that reality into a kind of new historicism, as Greenblatt says. According to Derrida's theory of difference, each writer expresses a different presence in the world. Thus, Serbian writers interpret the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its consequences three decades later in an authentic, unique, and specifically relevant way, valuable not only for the history of literature but also for history in general and the social context of our chronotope.

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