Christophe Ippolito: “Discours mythiques et écocritiques en dialogue: l’exemple d’Alexandrie d’Égypte”.Louisa Mackenzie: “It’s a Queer Thing: Early Modern French Ecocriticism”.Jonathan Krell: “Michel Serres, Luc Ferry, and the Possibility of a Natural Contract”.In 2012, Jeff Persels edited volume 39 of FLS at Brill. THE ENVIRONMENT IN FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE By channeling the voices and agencies of Earth’s nonhuman subterranean elements in all their omnipresent intimacy, Usher thus reconnects us not merely to the history of knowledge and beliefs about the Earth and its contents, but to our own fragile planet.” (Karen Raber, University of Mississippi) Exterranean engages with the record of human earthly entanglements in early modern European humanism, but always with a view to counterbalancing current distancing and idealizing views of a globe that is all surface, and no depth. “Usher’s brilliant study is a richly argued, erudite yet lyrical ode to the stuff of which the Earth is made. “For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction ? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.” (Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University) ![]() Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily.Įschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Summary: Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. This volume is published as part of the " Meaning Systems" series edited by Bruce Clark and Henry Sussman alongside works by scholars such as Barbara Cassin, Bernard Siegert, and Frédéric Neyrat. The video of Latour's "Inside" will be available soon.Įxterranean: Ecologies of Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene(New York: Fordham UP, 2019). Reading Ecologically with Posthuman Cultures Cohabiting With the Others Among Usīaptiste Morizot (Université Aix-Marseille)įrench Zoopoetics: Animals at the Intersection of Nature, Language, and Ethicsįerality in the Arts: Visualizing the Next Nature Theological-Political Arborescences: Louis Dorléans’s La plante humaine Paysages de France et paysage français dans la littérature (française) du XX ème siècle Chair: Judy Miller (NYU) Featuring: Frédérique Aït-Touati (CRAL ), Una Chaudhuri (NYU), Sarah Cameron Sunde (director, New York). Directed by Judy Miller (NYU) and Rachel Watson (NYU) Smith, Making and Knowing: Material Imaginaries of the Early Modern (Columbia) ![]() Sensing the Nature of Northern French Smokestacks from the 1860s to the 1880sīeing on Earth, or The Cosmic Agriculture ![]() Videos are now visible online of the "French Natures" conference that I co-organized at NYU with Frédérique Aït-Touati.įrédéric Neyrat (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |