Introducing a posthumanist concept of nostalgia to analyze steadily
widening themes of animality, home, travel, slavery, shopping, and
war in U.S. literature after 1945 Â In the Anthropocene, as
climate change renders environments less stable, the human desire
for place underscores the weakness of the individual in the face of
the world. In this book, Ryan Hediger introduces a distinctive
notion of homesickness, one in which the longing for place
demonstrates not only human vulnerability but also
intersubjectivity beyond the human. Arguing that this feeling is
unavoidable and characteristically posthumanist, Hediger studies
the complex mix of attitudes toward home, the homely, and the
familiar in an age of resurgent cosmopolitanism, especially
eco-cosmopolitanism. Homesickness closely examines U.S. literature
mostly after 1945, including prominent writers such as Annie
Proulx, Marilynne Robinson, and Ernest Hemingway, in light of the
challenges and themes of the Anthropocene. Hediger argues that our
desire for home is shorthand for a set of important hopes worth
defending—serious and genuine relationships to places and their
biotic regimes and landforms; membership in vital cultures, human
and nonhuman; resistance to capital-infused forms of globalization
that flatten differences and turn life and place into mere
resources. Our homesickness, according to Hediger, is inevitable
because the self is necessarily constructed with reference to the
material past. Therefore, homesickness is not something to dismiss
as nostalgic or reactionary but is rather a structure of feeling to
come to terms with and even to cultivate. Recasting an expansive
range of fields through the lens of homesickness—from
ecocriticism to animal studies and disability studies,
(eco)philosophy to posthumanist theory—Homesickness speaks not
only to the desire for a physical structure or place but also to a
wide range of longings and dislocations, including those related to
subjectivity, memory, bodies, literary form, and language.Â
General
Imprint: |
University of Minnesota Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
October 2019 |
First published: |
2019 |
Authors: |
Ryan Hediger
|
Dimensions: |
216 x 140 x 51mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
352 |
Edition: |
1 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-5179-0654-2 |
Categories: |
Books >
Humanities >
Philosophy >
General
Books >
Philosophy >
General
|
LSN: |
1-5179-0654-7 |
Barcode: |
9781517906542 |
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