The Disposition of Nature : Environmental Crisis and World Literature / Jennifer Wenzel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wenzel, Jennifer, 1969- Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Environmental degradation--Developing countries.

Environmental degradation.

Nature in literature.

Developing countries--Environmental conditions.

Developing countries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (352 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. Reading for the planet

Chapter 1. Consumption for the common good? commodity biography in an era of postconsumerism

Chapter 2. Hijacking the imagination: how to tell the story of the Niger delta

Chapter 3. From waste lands to wasted lives: enclosure as aesthetic regime and property regime

Chapter 4. How far is bhopal? inconvenient forums and corporate comparison

Epilogue. Fixing the world

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

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

ISBN:

9780823286799

0823286797

9780823288885

0823288889

9780823286805

0823286800

OCLC:

1132430683