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The weird South : ecologies of unknowing in postplantation literature / Melanie Benson Taylor.

Van Pelt Library PS261 .T39 2025
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Format:
Book
Author/Creator:
Taylor, Melanie Benson, 1976- author.
Series:
Mercer University Lamar memorial lectures ; no. 61.
Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures ; no. 61
Language:
English
Subjects (All):
American literature--Southern States--History and criticism.
American literature.
American literature--20th century--History and criticism.
Landscapes in literature.
Environmental degradation in literature.
Literature and society--United States--History--20th century.
Literature and society.
Ecocriticism.
American literature--History and criticism.
Literature and society--History.
Southern States.
United States.
Physical Description:
xxii, 98 pages ; 23 cm.
Place of Publication:
Athens, Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, 2025.
Summary:
"How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility--both for apocalypse and for deliverance--in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality? Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity's detention within what Timothy Morton calls the "weird" web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies. As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the "weird" is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects-neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control"-- Provided by publisher.
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Other Format:
ebook version :
ISBN:
9780820373836
0820373834
9780820373843
0820373842
OCLC:
1467671135
Publisher Number:
CIPO000246817

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