Ecocriticism Unbound
Ecocriticism Unbound features innovative interdisciplinary research in the environmental humanities. Confronting unraveling ecosystems and novel ecologies, books in the series redraw and reimagine ecocriticism’s boundaries, whether those be of genre, form, media, language, geography, nation, race, gender, bodies, species, or otherwise. It welcomes proposals that mend as much as they undo, that form new and unlikely eco-associations, or that seek to reorient the parameters of ecocritical discourse and posthumanist theory, especially beyond Anglophone texts and contexts. Accordingly, the series seeks to question and disrupt the capacity of texts to reorient both our understanding of an unbalanced planet and the field of ecocriticism. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes. All works are peer-reviewed and in English.
Editors:
Jason Groves, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA; Heather I. Sullivan, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Editorial Board:
Marga Carretero Gonzalez, University of Granada
Ursula Heise, University of California, Los Angeles
Reinhard Hennig, University of Agder
Serenella Iovino, University of North Carolina
Erin James, University of Idaho
Stephanie Posthumus, McGill University
Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington
Alexa Weik von Mossner, Universität Klagenfurt
Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University
Author / Editor information
Supplementary Materials
How do physical things differ from non-things—human subjects, animals, abstract ideas, or processes? Those questions, which are as old as philosophy itself, have inspired contemporary debates in ecocriticism, thing theory, and in the interdisciplinary field of new materialism. This book argues that contemporary narrative is well placed to map out and work through the spectrum of the material and the philosophical questions that underlie it. This is because narrative does not resolve the tensions at the heart of conceptions of materiality but rather reframes them, envisioning their implications and exploring their relevance to concrete contexts of human interaction. This monograph is structured around a number of novels, experimental fiction, films, and video games that imagine the inherent agency of things but also interrogate the affective and ethical significance of materiality in human terms. Its aim is to demonstrate the power of formal narrative analysis to foster conceptually and ethically sophisticated ways of thinking about thingness in times of ecological crisis—that is, times in which "stuff" can no longer be taken for granted.
