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Series Information: New Middle Ages
Series Information: New Middle Ages
Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane
matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined
metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt
rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from
the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the
elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons
who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological
enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although
geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues
that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world
in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a
profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency
undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a
bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for
recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve
and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for
interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major
contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept
-"Geophilia," "Time," "Force," and "Soul"-Cohen seamlessly brings
together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to
transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time,
the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear,
the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and
nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across
millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether
stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed
to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless
and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to
Iceland a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like
water is alive, that stone like water is transient."
Monsters provide a key to understanding the culture that spawned
them. So argues the essays in this wide-ranging collection that
asks the question, what happens when critical theorists take the
study of monsters seriously as a means of examining our culture? In
viewing the monstrous body as metaphor for the cultural body, the
contributors consider beasts, demons, freaks, and fiends as
symbolic expressions of very real fears and desires, signs of
cultural unease that pervade society and shape its collective
behaviour. Through a sampling of monsters as a conceptual category,
these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies
to our continued desire to explore the difference, prohibition and
the everchanging "borders of possibility". Topics treated include:
the connection between Beowulf, Frankenstein's monster, Dracula,
and Dr Jekyll's Hyde; the fascination with Chang and Eng, the
"Siamese twins" in 1830s America, and what it has to say about
anxieties regarding the recently "united" states; the idea of
monstrosity in Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles"; the use of
monstrosity in medieval anti-muslim polemics; and an exploration of
the creation myth embedded in "Jurassic Park".
For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four
elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination,
bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered
a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos
around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what
we build our houses against. Their renunciation has fostered only
estrangement from the material world. The essays collected in
Elemental Ecocriticism show how elemental materiality precipitates
new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements
reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water,
earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as
well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether,
phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this
volume provides important correctives to the idea of the material
world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the
connections of this collaborative project to the framing of
modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the
elemental holds the potential of a more dynamic environmental
ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.
A psychoanalytic look at the representation of monsters, giants and
masculinity in medieval texts. The phenomenon of giants and
giant-slaying appear in various texts from the Anglo-Saxon to late
Middle English period, including Beowulf, The Knight and the Lion,
History of the Kings of Britain and several of Chaucer's books.
Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green
dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What
about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the
excessive? What of the ocean's turbulence, the fecundity of
excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations?
Prismatic Ecology moves beyond the accustomed green readings of
ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility. In a
series of linked essays that span place, time, and discipline,
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings together writers who illustrate the
vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a
prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of
nonanthropocentric ecologies. "Red" engages sites of animal
violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; "Maroon" follows the
aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering
alternative modes of world composition; "Chartreuse" is a
meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime
excess; "Grey" is the color of the undead; "Ultraviolet" is a
potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known
nature. Featuring established and emerging scholars from varying
disciplines, this volume presents a collaborative imagining of what
a more-than-green ecology offers. While highlighting critical
approaches not yet common within ecotheory, the contributions
remain diverse and cover a range of topics including materiality,
the inhuman, and the agency of objects. By way of color, Cohen
guides readers through a reflection of an essentially complex and
disordered universe and demonstrates the spectrum as an
unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives.
Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Levi R.
Bryant, Collin College; Lowell Duckert, West Virginia U; Graham
Harman, American U in Cairo; Bernd Herzogenrath, Goethe U of
Frankfurt; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin, Italy; Eileen A. Joy;
Robert McRuer, George Washington U; Tobias Menely, Miami U; Steve
Mentz, St. John's U, New York City; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin
Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe U,
Ankara; Margaret Ronda, Rutgers U; Will Stockton, Clemson U; Allan
Stoekl, Penn State U; Ben Woodard; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.
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Earth (Paperback)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Linda T. Elkins-Tanton
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R363
R252
Discovery Miles 2 520
Save R111 (31%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books
about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In Earth, a planetary
scientist and a literary humanist explore what happens when we
think of the Earth as an object viewable from space. As a "blue
marble," "a blue pale dot," or, as Chaucer described it, "this
litel spot of erthe," the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and
to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the Earth
turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its
vast interior an inferno of incandescent and yet solid rock and a
reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world.
Viewing the Earth from space invites a dive into the abyss of
scale: how can humans apprehend the distances, the temperatures,
and the time scale on which planets are born, evolve, and die?
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in
The Atlantic.
Representations of masculinity in Chaucer's works examined through
modern critical theory. How does Chaucer portray the various male
pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales? How manly is Troilus? To what
extent can the spirit and terminology of recent feminist criticism
inform the study of Chaucer's men? Is there such athing as a
distinct `Chaucerian masculinity', or does it appear in a multitude
of different forms? These are some of the questions that the
contributors to this ground-breaking and provocative volume attempt
to answer, using a diversity of critical methods and theories. Some
look at the behaviour of noble or knightly men; some at clerics, or
businessmen, or churls; others examine the so-called "masculine"
qualities of female characters, and the "feminine"qualities of male
characters. Topics include the Host's bourgeois masculinity; the
erotic triangles operating in the Miller's Tale; why Chaucer
`diminished' the sexuality of Sir Thopas; and whether Troilus is
effeminate, impotent or an example of true manhood. PETER G.
BEIDLER is the Lucy G.Moses Distinguished Professor of English at
Lehigh University. Contributors: MARK ALLEN, PATRICIA CLARE INGHAM,
MARTIN BLUM, DANIEL F. PIGG, ELIZABETH M. BIEBEL, JEAN E. JOST,
CAROL EVEREST, ANDREA ROSSI-REDER, GLENN BURGER, PETER G. BEIDLER,
JEFFREY JEROME COHEN, DANIEL RUBEY, MICHAEL D. SHARP, PAUL R.
THOMAS, STEPHANIE DIETRICH, MAUD BURNETT MCINERNEY, DEREK BREWER
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Oceanic New York (Paperback)
Elizabeth Albert, Jamie Skye Bianco, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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R573
Discovery Miles 5 730
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The essays, manifestos, rants, screeds, pleas, soliloquies,
telegrams, broadsides, eulogies, songs, harangues, confessions,
laments, and acts of poetic terrorism in these two volumes - which
collectively form an academic "rave" - were culled, with some later
additions, from roundtable sessions at the International Congress
on Medieval Studies in 2012 and 2013, organized by postmedieval: a
journal for medieval cultural studies and the BABEL Working Group
("Burn After Reading: Miniature Manifestos for a Post/medieval
Studies," "Fuck This: On Letting Go," and "Fuck Me: On Never
Letting Go") and George Washington University's Medieval and Early
Modern Studies Institute ("The Future We Want: A Collaboration"),
respectively. Gathering together a rowdy multiplicity of voices
from within medieval and early modern studies, these two volumes
seek to extend and intensify a conversation about how to shape
premodern studies, and also the humanities, in the years ahead.
Authors in both volumes, in various ways, lay claim to the act(s)
of manifesting, and also anti-manifesting, as a collective endeavor
that works on behalf of the future without laying any belligerent
claims upon it, where we might craft new spaces for the
University-at-large, which is also a University that wanders, that
is never just somewhere, dwelling in the partitive - of a
particular place - but rather, seeks to be everywhere, always on
the move, pandemic, uncontainable, and always to-come, while also
being present/between us (manifest). This is not a book, but a
blueprint. TABLE OF CONTENTS Vol. 1: Miniature Manifestos for a
Post/medieval Studies, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Myra Seaman
Heather Bamford: INTENTIONALLY GOOD, REALLY BAD - Frank Battaglia:
SEEING A FOREST AS WELL AS TREES - Bettina Bildhauer: NET WORTH -
Martha Easton + Maggie Williams: OUR FEMINISM, OUR ACTIVISM - Ruth
Evans: BE CRITICAL - Joshua R. Eyler: THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON
MEDIEVAL STUDIES - Lara Farina: STICKING TOGETHER - Matthew
Gabriele: WAGING GUERRILLA WARFARE AGAINST THE 19TH CENTURY -
Gaelan Gilbert: MEDIEVAL STUDIES IN THE SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD - Noah D.
Guynn: RADICAL RIDICULE - David Hadbawnik: BURNED BEFORE WRITING -
Guy Halsall: HISTORY AND COMMITMENT - Cary Howie: ON NEVER LETTING
GO - Shayne Aaron Legassie: THE GOTHIC FLY - Erin Maglaque: FUCK
POSTCOLONIALISM - Material Collective: WE ARE THE MATERIAL
COLLECTIVE - Thomas Mical: MEDIEVAL SURREALIST MANIFESTO - Chris
Piuma: DE CATERVIS CETERIS - Daniel C. Remein: 2ND PROGRAM OF THE
ORNAMENTALISTS - Christopher Roman: A MEDIEVAL: MANIFESTO - Eva von
Contzen: HOMO NARRANS - Erik Wade: HISTORICISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
- Lisa Weston: 'TIS MAGICK, MAGICK THAT WILL HAVE RAVISHED ME Vol.
2: The Future We Want: A Collaboration, edited by Jeffrey Jerome
Cohen Anne Harris + Karen Eileen Overbey: FIELD CHANGE/DISCIPLINE
CHANGE - L.O. Aranye Fradenburg + Eileen A. Joy: PARADIGM
CHANGE/INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE - J. Allan Mitchell + Will Stockton:
TIME CHANGE/MODE CHANGE - Lowell Duckert + Steve Mentz: WORLD
CHANGE/SEA CHANGE - Chris Piuma + Jonathan Hsy: SPECTRAL VOICE
CHANGE/LANGUAGE CHANGE - Julie Orlemanski + Julian Yates:
COLLECTIVE CHANGE/MOOD CHANGE
Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics
explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider
communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life,
essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as
narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology
and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study
of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in
particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of
medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied
way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it
highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the
cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.
"Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects" examines what
happens when we cease to assume that only humans exert agency.
Through a careful examination of medieval, early modern and
contemporary lifeworlds, these essays collectively argue against
ecological anthropocentricity. Sheep, wolves, camels, flowers,
chairs, magnets, landscapes, refuse and gems are more than mere
objects. They act; they withdraw; they make demands; they connect
within lively networks that might foster a new humanism, or that
might proceed with indifference towards human affairs. Through what
ethics do we respond to these activities and forces? To what
futures do these creatures and objects invite us, especially when
they appear within the texts and cultures of the "distant" past?
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Jeffrey J. Cohen: "Introduction: All Things" -
Karl Steel: "With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The Postures
of the Wolf-Child of Hesse" - Sharon Kinoshita: "Animals and the
Medieval Culture of Empire" - Kellie Robertson: "Exemplary Rocks" -
Valerie Allen: "Mineral Virtue" - Peggy McCracken (University of
Michigan): "The Human and the Floral" - Eileen Joy: "You Are Here:
A Manifesto" - Julian Yates: "Sheep Tracks: A Multi-Species
Impression" - Julia Reinhard Lupton: "The Renaissance Res Publica
of Things" - Jane Bennett: "Powers of the Hoard: Notes on Material
Agency" Response Essays: Lowell Duckert, "Speaking Stones, John
Muir, and A Slower (Non)humanities" - Nedda Mehdizadeh, "Ruinous
Monument: Transporting Objects in Herbert's Persepolis" - Jonathan
Gil Harris, "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Twenty Questions"
The words most commonly associated with the environmental
movement—save, recycle, reuse, protect, regulate,
restore—describe what we can do to help the environment, but few
suggest how we might transform ourselves to better navigate the
sudden turns of the late Anthropocene. Which words can help us to
veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to
each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of
inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and
sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing
its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental
degradation, and global climate change. Some verbs are closely tied
to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade,
sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown,
unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or
counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while
several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent,
behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a
primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each
of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility,
awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew
from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for
the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and
potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic
planet. Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph
Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina,
West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F.
Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of
Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of
Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve
Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy
Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden,
Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C.
Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of
California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona
Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R.
Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa
Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of
Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of
British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College;
Julian Yates, U of Delaware.
Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics
explores new horizons in environmental studies, which consider
communication and meaning as core definitions of ecological life,
essential to deep sustainability. It considers landscape as
narrative, and applies theoretical frameworks in eco-phenomenology
and ecosemiotics to literary, historical, and philosophical study
of the relationship between text and landscape. It considers in
particular examples and lessons to be drawn from case studies of
medieval and Native American cultures, to illustrate in an applied
way the promise of environmental humanities today. In doing so, it
highlights an environmental future for the humanities, on the
cutting edge of cultural endeavor today.
The words most commonly associated with the environmental
movement—save, recycle, reuse, protect, regulate,
restore—describe what we can do to help the environment, but few
suggest how we might transform ourselves to better navigate the
sudden turns of the late Anthropocene. Which words can help us to
veer conceptually along with drastic environmental flux? Jeffrey
Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert asked thirty brilliant thinkers to
each propose one verb that stresses the forceful potential of
inquiry, weather, biomes, apprehensions, and desires to swerve and
sheer. Each term is accompanied by a concise essay contextualizing
its meaning in times of resource depletion, environmental
degradation, and global climate change. Some verbs are closely tied
to natural processes: compost, saturate, seep, rain, shade,
sediment, vegetate, environ. Many are vaguely unsettling: drown,
unmoor, obsolesce, power down, haunt. Others are enigmatic or
counterintuitive: curl, globalize, commodify, ape, whirl. And while
several verbs pertain to human affect and action—love, represent,
behold, wait, try, attune, play, remember, decorate, tend, hope—a
primary goal of Veer Ecology is to decenter the human. Indeed, each
of the essays speaks to a heightened sense of possibility,
awakening our imaginations and inviting us to think the world anew
from radically different perspectives. A groundbreaking guide for
the twenty-first century, Veer Ecology foregrounds the risks and
potentialities of living on—and with—an alarmingly dynamic
planet. Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Joseph
Campana, Rice U; Holly Dugan, George Washington U; Lara Farina,
West Virginia U; Cheryll Glotfelty, U of Nevada, Reno; Anne F.
Harris, DePauw U; Tim Ingold, U of Aberdeen; Serenella Iovino, U of
Turin; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Scott Maisano, U of
Massachusetts, Boston; Tobias Menely, U of California, Davis; Steve
Mentz, St. John’s U; J. Allan Mitchell, U of Victoria; Timothy
Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Laura Ogden,
Dartmouth College; Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Daniel C.
Remein, U of Massachusetts, Boston; Margaret Ronda, U of
California, Davis; Nicholas Royle, U of Sussex; Catriona
Sandilands, York U; Christopher Schaberg, Loyola U; Rebecca R.
Scott, U of Missouri; Theresa Shewry, U of California, Santa
Barbara; Mick Smith, Queen’s U; Jesse Oak Taylor, U of
Washington; Brian Thill, Golden West College; Coll Thrush, U of
British Columbia, Vancouver; Cord J. Whitaker, Wellesley College;
Julian Yates, U of Delaware.
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