|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making.
Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of
extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that
have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two
centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the
cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.
Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua
Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness
appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to
changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these
extinction events also involves examining what happens when the
conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude
are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close
readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together
environmental humanities and multispecies methods with
media-specific analyses at the terminus of life. What Is
Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography,
the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human
origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last
fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich
that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current
pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely
interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have
changed in the past and continue to change in the present.
What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new
philosophical field has emerged. "Existential risk" studies any
real or hypothetical human extinction event in the near or distant
future. This movement examines catastrophes ranging from runaway
global warming to nuclear warfare to malevolent artificial
intelligence, deploying a curious mix of utilitarian ethics,
statistical risk analysis, and, controversially, a transhuman
advocacy that would aim to supersede almost all extinction
scenarios. The proponents of existential risk thinking, led by
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, have seen their work gain immense
popularity, attracting endorsement from Bill Gates and Elon Musk,
millions of dollars, and millions of views. Calamity Theory is the
first book to examine the rise of this thinking and its failures to
acknowledge the ways some communities and lifeways are more at risk
than others and what it implies about human extinction.
Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of
breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and
finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in
notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal
articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray
literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and
speculation take place in scholarship.
Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making.
Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of
extinction. What Is Extinction? examines several key moments that
have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two
centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the
cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.
Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua
Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness
appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to
changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these
extinction events also involves examining what happens when the
conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude
are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close
readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together
environmental humanities and multispecies methods with
media-specific analyses at the terminus of life. What Is
Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography,
the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human
origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last
fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich
that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current
pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely
interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have
changed in the past and continue to change in the present.
Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century
literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of
contexts. From familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and Hart
Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative fiction,
this volume tackles a series of related questions regarding how
best to understand humanity’s increasing domination of the
natural world.
Modernism and the Anthropocene explores twentieth-century
literature as it engages with the non-human world across a range of
contexts. From more familiar modernist works by D.H. Lawrence and
Hart Crane to still-emergent genres like comics and speculative
fiction, this volume tackles a series of related questions
regarding how best to understand humanity's increasing domination
of the natural world.
The Ecology of Modernism explores the unexpected absence of an envi
ronmental ethic in American modernist and avant-garde poetics,
given its keen concern with an ecological esthetic. Joshua Schuster
explains why American modernism was never green. In The Ecology of
Modernism, Joshua Schuster examines the rela tionships of key
modernist writers, poets, and musicians to nature, industrial
development, and pollution. He posits that that the curious failure
of modernist poets to develop an environmental ethnic was a
deliberate choice and not an inadvertent omission. In his opening
passage, Schuster boldly invokes lines from Walt Whit man's
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," which echo as a paean to pollution:
"Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at
night fall!" Schuster labels this theme "regeneration through
pollution" and demonstrates how this motif recurs in modernist
compositions. This tolerance for, if not actual exultation of, the
by-products of industri alization hindered modernist American
artists, writers, and musicians from embracing environmentalist
agendas. Schuster provides specific case studies about Marianne
Moore and her connection of fables with animal rights; Gertrude
Stein and concepts of nature in her avant-garde poetics; early
blues music and poetry and the issue of how environmental disasters
(floods, droughts, pestilence) affected black farmers and artists
in the American South; and John Cage, who extends the modernist
avant-garde project formally but critiques it at the same time for
failing to engage with ecology. A fas cinating afterword about the
role of oil modernist literary production rounds out this work.
Schuster masterfully shines a light on the modernist interval
between the writings of bucolic and nature-extolling Romantics and
the emer gence of a self-conscious green movement in the 1960s.
This reward ing work shows that the reticence of modernist poets in
the face of resource depletion, pollution, animal rights, and other
ecological traumas is highly significant.
|
|