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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Containing The Jeremiad: Understanding Paradigms Of Anxiety In Global Climate Change Experience, Brian Glaser
Containing The Jeremiad: Understanding Paradigms Of Anxiety In Global Climate Change Experience, Brian Glaser
English Faculty Articles and Research
This essay uses Bion’s concept of “containing” to read the psychological dynamics of jeremiads about global climate change, arguing that their structure reveals a strategy of communication that may be useful for more broadly raising awareness about this challenging state of the planet. More specifically, I argue that contemporary global climate change jeremiads have a structure that first elicits alarm and then moves to discuss solutions, and that this structure may be beneficial to those who are awakening to the reality of global climate change by rendering anxiety bearable and therefore open to purposive and creative response.
Americans And Climate Change: Transnationalism And Reflection In Environmental Writing, Brian Glaser
Americans And Climate Change: Transnationalism And Reflection In Environmental Writing, Brian Glaser
English Faculty Articles and Research
This article reads three American works of climate change life writing in order to examine how print culture in America is responding to growing awareness of the threat of global climate change. Engaging with Ursula Heise’s work on American environmental writing, I argue against a binary conception of cosmopolitan and provincial responses to this threat, seeking to show how ambitious individual reactions to climate change are complicated and enhanced by ways of relating and collaborating with other humans and other species.
Environmental Crisis And Transitional Phenomena: Brenda Hillman’S Ecopoetic Playing, Brian Glaser
Environmental Crisis And Transitional Phenomena: Brenda Hillman’S Ecopoetic Playing, Brian Glaser
English Faculty Articles and Research
Many writings in ecopsychology make reference to “the environmental crisis” as an apocalyptic scenario, but few define the cause of this crisis. This essay proposes that the cause for apocalyptic rhetoric of environmental crisis is as much psychological as environmental. It draws on Winnicott’s idea of playing as haunted by the otherness of reality to offer a therapeutic reading of the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser and Brenda Hillman in which the imaginative resources of trope, apostrophe, dedication and allusion serve to make bearable the anxiety that leads to apocalyptic rhetoric in ecopsychological writings.