Elemental Ecocriticism
Subtitle: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
Published: Dec 23, 2015
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780816693078
Description: For centuries it was believed that all matter was composed of four elements: earth, air, water, and fire in promiscuous combination, bound by love and pulled apart by strife. Elemental theory offered a mode of understanding materiality that did not center the cosmos around the human. Outgrown as a science, the elements are now what we build our houses against, and their renunciation has fostered only estrangement from the material world. Elemental Ecocriticism shows how elemental materiality precipitates new engagements with the ecological. Here the classical elements reveal the vitality of supposedly inert substances (mud, water, earth, air), chemical processes (fire), and natural phenomena, as well as the promise in the abandoned and the unreal (ether, phlogiston, spontaneous generation). Decentering the human, this collection of essays provides important correctives to the idea of the material world as mere resource. Three response essays meditate on the connections of this collaborative project to the framing of modern-day ecological concerns. A renewed intimacy with the elemental holds the potential for a more dynamic environmental ethics and the possibility of a reinvigorated materialism.
Notes: Source title: Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire