ethics

Taking up the green thread from ebr4, Harold Fromm reviews three new books of eco-criticism >--- ebr4 critical ecologies.

Eugene Thacker sees ethical acting as a potential stumbling block, one that trips up technological complicity.

Eric Dean Rasmussen explores Lynne Tillman's "cognitive aesthetic," suggesting that her work is powered by the generative disconnect between asignifying affect and signifying emotion. He argues that her 1998 novel, No Lease on Life, examines the role of affectively sustained universal values in responding politically to the neoliberal city.

In this review Veronica Vold charts the posthuman environmental ethic in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self and notes how the text draws together issues of race, (dis)ability, and the environment in a way that disrupts the boundaries between bodies and places.

Beginning his review by reflecting on the book's cover art, John Bruni speculates that a punk aesthetic runs throughout Alaimo's posthuman environmentalism. Providing brief treatments of each chapter, he argues that the book's trans-corporeal understanding of the relationship between bodies and places disrupts "the very heart of what we know about ourselves."