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ecocriticism

Global Warming, Globalization, and Environmental Literary History

Lance Newman suggests Ecocriticism shares a problematic assumption with "green" capitalism: the idea "a livable future will result from billions of individual ethical decisions." Here he traces a burgeoning critical alternative that investigates the historical connections between global capital and the shifting structures of the "ecosocial."

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There is perhaps nothing in either R/romanticism or neo-Romanticism that requires identification with critical naivete and ignorance, here, or with necessarily less theoretically sophisticated approaches than the alternatives to be proposed in what follows. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that R/romanticism is in fact the best name for that “masocritical” insurgency, undertaken from within the Erinnerung of Euro-Atlantic modernity, which, in its preservation of a figure of strong and even incommensurable “local” difference, stands the best chance of contacting the opposition traced by this essay’s invocations of “refutation,” “resistance in the present,” and the pragmatically unaddressable “incommensurability of the problems we face.” Indeed, one might say that in context of a certain natural (and not at all illegitimate) tendency to statism, in the profoundly bureaucratic institution of the academy, R/romantic anticapitalism is, as the work of Michael Löwy suggests, too easily dismissed—and that it is as good a vehicle as any for the specific critical package described in item #2 (“Internationalism and Politics”), below: not “post-colonial theory” as a perhaps finally inter-statist accommodation of (any new) global order (in the new national transnationalisms and hemispherizations, the new global comparatisms, and so on), but anticolonial criticism as insistence on local autonomy and self-determination, in setting multiple, epistemically distributed terms for any such critical debate.

‐ Brian Lennon

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Still, all this might require imagining a methodology which, beyond marking positive connective relations between positive (visible) figures (Thoreau and Commandante Marcos), however far flung from each other, sees in “deep time” (the cue taken from Dimock’s work, below) the figure of erasure that any insurgent self-critical project of Euro-Atlantic modernity itself—such as a renovated ecocritical or any other criticism—must also face. We mustn’t forget, perhaps, that there is no properly “global scale” for comparison: “the globe” is a circumscriptive figure, in equal or greater measure as it is inclusive.

‐ Brian Lennon

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Ursula K. Heise makes a consonant argument in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford UP, 2008), which looks at (among other dimensions of the evolution of ecocritical thought itself) the dynamic tension through which the globalist-environmentalist thought of the 1960s-70s propelled itself forward in tension with the U.S American line of antimodernist environmentalist and ecocritical localism.

‐ Brian Lennon

ecocriticism

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