Narrow your search
Listing 1 - 10 of 20 << page
of 2
>>
Sort by

Book
Ökologische transformationen und literarische repräsentationen : Graduiertenkolleg Interdisziplinäre Umweltgeschichte, Seminar für Deutsche Philologie
Authors: --- ---
ISBN: 9783941875869 3941875868 Year: 2010 Publisher: Universitätsverlag Göttingen

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

Since the 1990s, questions about the relationship between changes in the natural environment and their literary representations have been subsumed and discussed in the field of literary studies under the term Ecocriticism. In this volume, environmental historical perspectives are also included in the discussion. On the one hand, one must ask how the change in the human relationship to "nature" (and the changing nuances of meaning of this term) is negotiated in literary texts at different times and which new literary forms of expression it may provoke. On the other hand, one must also ask how literary and cultural patterns can affect the design of the natural environment. To what extent do literary models of change correspond diachronically and synchronously with change processes in nature? This double question also includes the possibility of a reciprocal critique of environmental historical and literary perspectives.


Book
This radical land : a natural history of American dissent
Author:
ISBN: 022633631X Year: 2018 Publisher: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press,

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.


Book
American classics : evolutionary perspectives
Author:
ISBN: 1618117653 1618115928 1618117661 Year: 2018 Publisher: Academic Studies Press

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

This collection of essays offers evolutionary psychological analysis of selected works from the American literary tradition. Application of evolutionary theory to writing by Ben Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, F. Scot Fitzgerald, Zora Neal Hurston, and others creates an interdisciplinary framework for examining key textual features: plot, theme, tone, setting, symbol, characterization, point of view; and at the same time provides an accessible introduction to Darwinian literary critical methodology. Pertinent scientific research, together with essential terms and concepts, is explained in context. Connections are made throughout to existing commentary on the targeted texts, illustrating how Darwinian scrutiny can enrich, extend, or reconfigure understandings derived from other critical approaches.


Book
Sustainability and the American Naturalist Tradition : Revisiting Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Edward O. Wilson
Author:
ISBN: 3837641783 3839441781 9783839441787 Year: 2018 Publisher: Bielefeld transcript Verlag

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

Humanity is failing at solving complex socio-ecological problems like global climate change, biodiversity loss and population growth. The existing 'sustainable development' paradigm and its reliance on trade-offs between the three pillars of environment, economics, and equity is not robust enough to maintain global carrying capacity. In this timely intervention, Thomas argues that the holistic and transdisciplinary thinking of four iconic American naturalists - Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and Edward O. Wilson - can instead help to solve our biggest twenty-first century challenges by synthesizing values from four eras of cultural and environmental history. Besprochen in: Amos International, 13/1 (2019), Ana Honnacker Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24.08.2019, Martin Zähringer

The senses of Walden
Author:
ISBN: 0226098133 129910472X 022607501X 9780226098135 9780226075013 Year: 1992 Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press,

Enthusiast! : Essays on modern American literature
Author:
ISBN: 9781526125118 1526125110 9781526126306 1526126303 9780719095849 0719095840 9780719074288 0719074282 Year: 2007 Publisher: Manchester : Manchester university press,

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers – Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – have modernized and re-modeled Emerson’s founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on. Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American Literature or Modern Poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work.


Book
Xenocitizens: Illiberal Ontologies in Nineteenth-Century America
Author:
ISBN: 0823287777 082328767X Year: 2020 Publisher: Fordham University Press

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

In Xenocitizens, Jason Berger returns to the antebellum United States in order to challenge a scholarly tradition based on liberal–humanist perspectives. Through the concept of the xenocitizen, a synthesis of the terms “xeno,” which connotes alien or stranger, and “citizen,” which signals a naturalized subject of a state, Berger uncovers realities and possibilities that have been foreclosed by dominant paradigms. Innovatively re-orienting our thinking about traditional nineteenth-century figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau as well as formative writers such as William Wells Brown, Martin R. Delany, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Xenocitizens glimpses how antebellum thinkers formulated, in response to varying forms of oppression and crisis, startlingly unique ontological and social models as well as unfamiliar ways to exist and to leverage change. In doing so, Berger offers us a different nineteenth century—pushing our imaginative and critical thinking toward new terrain.


Book
This new yet unapproachable America : lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein
Author:
ISBN: 022603741X 9780226037417 9780226037387 022603738X Year: 2013 Volume: 1987 Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press,

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

Stanley Cavell is a titan of the academic world; his work in aesthetics and philosophy has shaped both fields in the United States over the past forty years. In this brief yet enlightening collection of lectures, Cavell investigates the work of two of his most tried-and-true subjects: Emerson and Wittgenstein. Beginning with an introductory essay that places his own work in a philosophical and historical context, Cavell guides his reader through his thought process when composing and editing his lectures while making larger claims about the influence of institutions on philosophers, and the idea of progress within the discipline of philosophy. In "Declining Decline," Cavell explains how language modifies human existence, looking specifically at the culture of Wittgenstein's writings. He draws on Emerson, Thoreau, and many others to make his case that Wittgenstein can indeed be viewed as a "philosopher of culture." In his final lecture, "Finding as Founding," Cavell writes in response to Emerson's "Experience," and explores the tension between the philosopher and language-that he or she must embrace language as his or her "form of life," while at the same time surpassing its restrictions. He compares finding new ideas to discovering a previously unknown land in an essay that unabashedly celebrates the power and joy of philosophical thought.

At home in nature : modern homesteading and spiritual practice in America
Author:
ISBN: 1282357859 0520937864 9786612357855 1598755811 9780520937864 1423717317 9781423717317 9781598755817 9780520241404 0520241401 9780520241428 0520241428 9781282357853 6612357851 Year: 2005 Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press,

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

Motivated variously by the desire to reject consumerism, to live closer to the earth, to embrace voluntary simplicity, or to discover a more spiritual path, homesteaders have made the radical decision to go "back to the land," rejecting modern culture and amenities to live self-sufficiently and in harmony with nature. Drawing from vivid firsthand accounts as well as from rich historical material, this gracefully written study of homesteading in America from the late nineteenth century to the present examines the lives and beliefs of those who have ascribed to the homesteading philosophy, placing their experiences within the broader context of the changing meanings of nature and religion in modern American culture. Rebecca Kneale Gould investigates the lives of famous figures such as Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, Ralph Borsodi, Wendell Berry, and Helen and Scott Nearing, and she presents penetrating interviews with many contemporary homesteaders. She also considers homesteading as a form of dissent from consumer culture, as a departure from traditional religious life, and as a practice of environmental ethics.


Book
Civilizing Thoreau : human ecology and the emerging social sciences in the major works
Author:
ISBN: 1782047646 1571139605 Year: 2016 Publisher: Rochester, New York : Camden House,

Loading...
Export citation

Choose an application

Bookmark

Abstract

Recent book-length studies of Thoreau have focused either on his place in the history of the natural sciences or have applied political principles to his works. None, however, has fully addressed whatecocritic Rebecca Solnit calls "the Thoreau problem," the compartmentalizing of Thoreau's mind into either that of a hermit of nature or that of a champion of social reform. This book proposes an interdisciplinary solution to this problem through the connection between Thoreau's ecological study of nature and his intense interest in the emerging social sciences, especially the history of civilization and ethnology. The book first establishes Thoreau's "human ecology," the relation between the natural sciences and the social sciences in his thinking, exploring how his reading in contemporary books about the history of humanity and racial science shaped his thinking and connecting these emerging anthropological texts to his late nature writings. It then discusses these connections in his major works, including Walden and his "reform papers" such as "Civil Disobedience," the travel narrative A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. The concluding chapter focuses on Thoreau's attitude toward Manifest Destiny, arguing, against conventional views, that considering both his life and his writing, especially the essay "Walking," we must conclude that he both accepted and endorsed Manifest Destiny as an inevitable result of cultural succession. Richard J. Schneider is Professor Emeritus from Wartburg College.He has authored a monograph and many articles as well as edited three collections on Thoreau.

Listing 1 - 10 of 20 << page
of 2
>>
Sort by