Coming into Contact
Description
A snapshot of ecocriticism in action, Coming into Contact collects sixteen previously unpublished essays that explore some of the most promising new directions in the study of literature and the environment. They look to previously unexamined or underexamined aspects of literature's relationship to the environment, including swamps, internment camps, Asian American environments, the urbanized Northeast, and lynching sites. The authors relate environmental discourse to practice, including the teaching of green design in composition classes, the restoration of damaged landscapes, the persuasive strategies of environmental activists, the practice of urban architecture, and the impact of human technologies on nature.
The essays also put ecocriticism into greater contact with the natural sciences, including elements of evolutionary biology, biological taxonomy, and geology. Engaging both ecocritical theory and practice, these authors more closely align ecocriticism with the physical environment, with the wide range of texts and cultural practices that concern it, and with the growing scholarly conversation that surrounds this concern.
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Persons
ANN A. MERRILL is the Thomson Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies at Davidson College, where she taught in the English and Environmental Studies departments for thirty years. She is coeditor of Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Georgia) with Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon, and Adam Sweeting. An avid gardener and flower enthusiast, she is committed to raising awareness about the crucial importance of plants both historically and today. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Ian Marshall (Editor)
IAN MARSHALL is professor of English and environmental studies at Penn State Altoona. He is the author, most recently, of Peak Experiences: Walking Meditations on Literature, Nature, and Need and the coeditor of Coming into Contact: Essays in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Georgia).
Daniel J. Philippon (Editor)
DANIEL J. PHILIPPON is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Program in Agricultural, Food, and Environmental Ethics. He is editor of a critical edition of Mabel Osgood Wright's The Friendship of Nature and coeditor of the anthology The Height of Our Mountains.
Adam W. Sweeting (Editor)
ADAM W. SWEETING, the author of Beneath the Second Sun and Reading Houses and Building Books, is an associate professor of humanities at Boston University, College of General Studies.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Thinking of Our Life in Nature
- Part 1. Who Are We? Where Are We? Exploring the Boundaries of Ecocriticism
- Of Swamp Dragons: Mud, Megalopolis, and a Future for Ecocriticism
- Challenging the Confines: Haiku from the Prison Camps
- Beyond Walden Pond: Asian American Literature and the Limits of Ecocriticism
- To Name Is to Claim, or Remembering Place: Native American Writers Reclaim the Northeast
- Lynching Sites: Where Trauma and Pastoral Collide
- Part 2. The Solid Earth! The Actual World! Environmental Discourse and Practice
- Composition and the Rhetoric of Eco-Effective Design
- A Mosaic of Landscapes: Ecological Restoration and the Work of Leopold, Coetzee, and Silko
- Apocalyptic or Precautionary? Revisioning Texts in Environmental Literature
- Facing the True Costs of Living: Arundhati Roy and Ishimure Michiko on Dams and Writing
- Romanticism and the City: Toward a Green Architecture
- Annie Dillard and the Book of Job: Notes toward a Postnatural Ecocriticism
- Part 3. Contact! Contact! Interdisciplinary Connections
- Seeking Common Ground: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities
- Mindless Fools and Leaves That Run: Subjectivity, Politics, and Myth in Scientific Nomenclature
- Reading after Darwin: A Prospectus
- Of Spiders, Ants, and Carnivorous Plants: Domesticity and Darwin in Mary Treat's Home Studies in Nature
- The Great, Shaggy Barbaric Earth: Geological Writings of John Burroughs
- Contributors
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
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