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In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere
confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid
spectacularly negative future projections of environmental
collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls,
shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that
their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare
their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes
inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate
the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the
accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions
for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with
early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long
since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive
affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues.
Each chapter places a vanitas motif—canvas, debris, toxics,
paper, ark, meat, and light—in conversation with stories and
images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park
geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat.
Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory,
this book argues we ought to keep reading, even by the flickering
light of extinction.
In this experimental work of ecocriticism, Vincent Bruyere
confronts the seeming pointlessness of the humanities amid
spectacularly negative future projections of environmental
collapse. The vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries dazzlingly depict heaps of riches alongside skulls,
shells, and hourglasses. Sometimes even featuring the illusion that
their canvases are peeling away, vanitas images openly declare
their own pointlessness in relation to the future. This book takes
inspiration from the vanitas tradition to fearlessly contemplate
the stakes of the humanities in the Anthropocene present, when the
accumulated human record could well outlast the climate conditions
for our survival. Staging a series of unsettling encounters with
early modern texts and images whose claims of relevance have long
since expired, Bruyere experiments with the interpretive
affordances of allegory and fairytale, still life and travelogues.
Each chapter places a vanitas motif—canvas, debris, toxics,
paper, ark, meat, and light—in conversation with stories and
images of the Anthropocene, from the Pleistocene Park
geoengineering project to toxic legacies to in-vitro meat.
Considering questions of quiet erasure and environmental memory,
this book argues we ought to keep reading, even by the flickering
light of extinction.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project is an arctic archive
designed to preserve the world's agricultural biodiversity. What do
it and other novel forms of storage tell us about our relationship
to the future in a time of resource depletion and extinction
scenarios? In this innovative book, Vincent Bruyere offers an
invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens:
the difference between storage and burial in the age of
sustainability science. Perishability Fatigue considers questions
of permanence and the potentiality of retrieval, noting the
tensions within our collective sense of time and finitude. Bruyere
reflects on the nature and significance of perishability, asking
what it means to have one's sense of temporality engendered by seed
banks and frozen embryo storage, genetically modified organisms and
the "de-extinction" of species, nuclear-waste repositories,
oncology, and palliative care. He draws attention to the scripts
and scenarios that mediate our relations to loss and decay,
preservation and conservation, emphasizing the inequalities
implicit in technologies of perishability, which promise continuity
in the future to some while refusing it to others. A highly
interdisciplinary study, Perishability Fatigue reframes the
environmental humanities and humanistic inquiry into sustainability
science by developing a new language to commemorate fatigue and
transience in a culture of preparedness and survival.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault project is an arctic archive
designed to preserve the world's agricultural biodiversity. What do
it and other novel forms of storage tell us about our relationship
to the future in a time of resource depletion and extinction
scenarios? In this innovative book, Vincent Bruyere offers an
invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens:
the difference between storage and burial in the age of
sustainability science. Perishability Fatigue considers questions
of permanence and the potentiality of retrieval, noting the
tensions within our collective sense of time and finitude. Bruyere
reflects on the nature and significance of perishability, asking
what it means to have one's sense of temporality engendered by seed
banks and frozen embryo storage, genetically modified organisms and
the "de-extinction" of species, nuclear-waste repositories,
oncology, and palliative care. He draws attention to the scripts
and scenarios that mediate our relations to loss and decay,
preservation and conservation, emphasizing the inequalities
implicit in technologies of perishability, which promise continuity
in the future to some while refusing it to others. A highly
interdisciplinary study, Perishability Fatigue reframes the
environmental humanities and humanistic inquiry into sustainability
science by developing a new language to commemorate fatigue and
transience in a culture of preparedness and survival.
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