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Green Worlds And Ecosemiotics, Paul Siewers

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

"Overlay landscapes" in Early Insular literatures, and how they connect early medieval cosmology with current-day ecosemiotics..

The Ecosemiosphere: Story And Region In Insular Medieval Literatures, Paul Siewers

Faculty Conference Papers and Presentations

Reflections on the interrelation of environmental humanities studies, physics and semiotics, as part of an international panel introducing ecosemiotics and biosemiotics to the North American ecocriticism communtiy at large.

Residues Of The Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness In Postwar American Culture And Fiction, Thomas J. Barnes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Residues of the Cold War: Emergent Waste Consciousness in Postwar American Culture and Fiction argues that garbage of the post-World War II period can be read as an index of the Cold War cultural landscape and its structure of feeling. This dissertation treats these remainders as archival materials, documents with a kind of textuality, and suggests that when rendered legible their function as crucial sites of conflicting ideologies and discourses can be recognized. Employing the interdisciplinary methods of ecocriticism and cultural materialism, I read Cold War trash to provide a new account of American Cold War culture and literature by …

It Is Well With My Soil: Ecocriticism Of Wendell Berry's Jayber Crow And Hannah Coulter & Marilynne Robinson's Gilead And Housekeeping, Lauren Hoessly

Masters Theses

Ecocriticism places nature as the central subject of life, but avoids analysis of human relationships as an integral part of man's relationship with nature. Wendell Berry's novels Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter, and Marilynne Robinson's novels, Gilead and Housekeeping posit ecocritical claims about man and his work in nature without forsaking the union of the body and soul. Thus, Berry and Robinson connect relationships between people to this work in nature in order to reveal the relationship between man and God. They integrate principles of environmental recovery with Christian principles of redemption, and thereby offer new possibilities for ecocritical writing …

Nature In A Box: Ecocriticism, Goethe’S Ironic Werther, And Unbalanced Nature, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Ecocriticism emphasizes how our bodily and ecological boundaries are just as porous, inter-penetrable, and open as are our cultural and linguistic realms. As individual bodies and communities, we are fully immersed in our material environment and participating in constant exchanges of matter and energy. In this essay, I nevertheless advocate for a cautious approach to the ecocritical question of contested boundaries. After all, some boundaries and membranes are necessary to maintain living organisms. Regarding Timothy Morton’s assertion that we are “radically open,” I note the need for stable and healthy membranes to sustain life, such as our porous yet enclosed …

Affinity Studies And Open Systems: A Non-Equilibrium, Ecocritical Reading Of Goethe's Faust, Heather I. Sullivan

Modern Languages and Literatures Faculty Research

Ecocriticism’s contributions to the current rejection of dualistic thinking are noteworthy, particularly when this interdisciplinary field concentrates on hybridity and “relations” that preexist essences. In this mode, ecocriticism participates in a broader development of “affnity studies” that encompass the many efforts across the disciplines toward reconfiguring our “intraactions” with the world in terms that avoid dichotomies and Newtonian linearity and that utilize instead nonlinear, nondualistic forms of “hybridity.” Hybrids, in Steve Hinchliffe’s words, are “more or less durable bodies made up of similarly hybrid and impermanent relations.

Cultural Botany: Toward A Model Of Transdisciplinary, Embodied, And Poetic Research Into Plants, John C. Ryan

Research outputs 2011

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective (technical, scientific, reductionistic, visual) and subjective (emotive, artistic, relational, multi-sensory) forms of knowledge. The foundations of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental …

Nature, Domestic Labor, And Moral Community In Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours And Elinor Wyllys, Richard M. Magee

English Faculty Publications

Cooper's argument for a domestic ideal situated within a rural setting reinforces the importance of community connections through a shared sense of morality, as well as understanding of the natural world. Community alone—the human connections—never seems to be enough in Cooper's formulation, but must always exist with an awareness of the world outside the narrow confines of one's own domestic sphere. Concern for one's fellow-beings necessitates a concern for the world in which these beings live, and Cooper understands that when any bonds are broken—such as the bonds that connect us to the natural world—other bonds are threatened. Thus, when …

Gathering Points: Australian Poetry: A Natural Selection, Phillip Hall

University of Wollongong Thesis Collection 1954-2016

As a child I lived in the Blue Mountains of NSW. My house stood a stone’s throw from the Great Western Highway and railway line: noise and bustle, the Indian Pacific, Mack trucks. From our front veranda I gazed up that highway, west, all the way to Perth, while outside our back fence was a gully. I mucked up, the artful dodger escaping jobs, turning to outside-the-back-gate.

Once in my gully, I was an adventurer or an explorer, maybe even an escaped convict. At the head of the gully was a series of small rock pools surrounded by thick native …

The Gay Of The Land: Queer Ecology And The Literature Of The 1960s, Jill Elizabeth Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue not only that queer ecology is a legitimate and important next step for ecocritics and queer theorists but also that its literary application does a great amount of good in exploring and dismantling the natural/unnatural binary and exposing the ecological impact of the choices humans make everyday. I take as my method a combination of queer and environmental theory and literary criticism, as well as the foundational queer ecocritical works and include important historical and political perspectives influencing the emergence of the environmental and gay and lesbian movements. Through this dissertation, I legitimize more recent …

Small Flowerings Of Unhu: The Survival Of Community In Tsitsi Dangarembga's Novels, Dana Rine

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Tsitsi Dangarembga‟s Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

Aesthetics Of The Brink: Environmental Crisis And The Sublime In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein And Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Aaron Francis Schneeberger

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Mary Shelley�s Frankenstein is today remembered as the progenitor of the science fiction genre, the first major literary work to link a long history of fictional narratives concerning the origins of life � notably drawing itself from the stories of Prometheus and Milton�s Paradise Lost � to the scientific rationalism of the enlightenment. Of the science fiction stories that would follow, Philip K. Dick�s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? perhaps remains one of the closest to Shelley�s novel in terms of its concerns and themes. Dick�s text is concerned with the thematic of the creation of human simulacra, but …

The Deep Ecology Movement: Origins, Development, And Future Prospects (Toward A Transpersonal Ecosophy), Alan Drengson, Bill Devall, Mark A. Schroll

International Journal of Transpersonal Studies

The deep ecology movement, which began with Arne Naess’ introduction of the term in

1972, is compared with other movements for social responsibility that developed in the

20th century. The paper discusses Naess’ cross-cultural approach to characterizing grassroots

movements via platform principles that can be supported from a diversity of cultures,

worldviews, and personal philosophies, and explains his use of “ecosophy.” The deep ecology

movement’s relationship with ecopsychology, ecocriticism, and humanistic and transpersonal

psychology is described as part of an emerging synthesis referred to as transpersonal ecosophy.

The inquiry concludes with a technical discussion of Naess’ Apron Diagram and reflections …