Exterranean : Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene / Phillip John Usher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Usher, Phillip John, Author.

Series:

Meaning systems.

Fordham scholarship online.

Meaning Systems

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ecocriticism.

Human ecology.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (223 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. 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. 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. 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.Eschewing 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. 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. 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. 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Figures

Incipit: From sub- to exterranean

Chapter 1. Terra has standing

Chapter 2. Terre's brilliant mines

Chapter 3. Terra globalized

Chapter 4. Sickly mountainsides

Chapter 5. Demonic mines

Chapter 6. Geomedia

Chapter 7. Saline intimacies

Explicit

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

This edition previously issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

9780823286058

0823286053

9780823284238

0823284239

9780823284245

0823284247

OCLC:

1083100204