Human Plant Entanglement And Vegetal Agency In The Poetry Of Thomas Hardy And Sylvia Plath

Dilek Bulut Sarıkaya scrutinizes human-plant entanglement in the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Sylvia Plath from the perspective of critical plant studies, which is committed to restoring the lost connection between humans and plants. The author offers a theoretical reading of Hardy and Plath’s poetry, focusing specifically on how plants are depicted by these two poets as self-conscious and emotional individuals who are turned into vulnerable victims of humans’ exploitative practices. The author develops a critical argument on the necessity of eradicating humans’ anthropocentric mindsets, categorizing plants as sessile, inert objects and replaces it with a plant-centric world view, perceiving plants as instantly active biological organisms who exist with their botanical accuracy rather than with the impositions of humans’ metaphoric meanings upon them.

Critical Plant Studies in Taiwan presents a historical overview of vegetal ecocriticism in Taiwan. Divided into 12 chapters, it examines the human-plant entanglements on the island. Covering a wide spectrum of topics, such as the imperial plant explorations, the military casuarina afforestation, the mangrove conservation movement, the ecofeminist rooftop garden, the Indigenous millet restoration, the underground mycorrhizal network in urban Taipei, etc., it discloses the phyto-politics in the historical context of the vegetal materialist condition of the island. Intersecting the poetics and politics of plant narratives, it presents the multispecies plantscapes of the island. The first of its kind, the collection launches the historical and localized critical plant studies in Taiwan.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

This book studies representations of plants in contemporary American, English, and Australian poetry, addressing the relationship between poetic language and the subjectivity, agency, sentience, consciousness, and intelligence of vegetal life. It forwards an interdisciplinary model of 'botanical criticism' in examining the role of plants in contemporary poetic expression. Drawing from recent plant science and contributing to the new field of critical plant studies, Ryan redresses the lack of botanical emphasis in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the environmental humanities. This book will be of interest to the emerging areas of human-plant studies, critical plant studies, and cultural botany.

The new edition of this highly succesful poetry anthology includes new poems, new notes and exercises, and has a freshly- designed, learning friendly format that makes it even more relevant and accessible to students in Southern Africa

Writing the Nation displays key literary movements and the American authors associated with the movement. Topics include late romanticism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and modern literature. Contents: Late Romanticism (1855-1870) Realism (1865-1890) Local Color (1865-1885) Regionalism (1875-1895) William Dean Howells Ambrose Bierce Henry James Sarah Orne Jewett Kate Chopin Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Charles Waddell Chesnutt Charlotte Perkins Gilman Naturalism (1890-1914) Frank Norris Stephen Crane Turn of the Twentieth Century and the Growth of Modernism (1893 - 1914) Booker T. Washington Zane Grey Modernism (1914 - 1945) The Great War Une Generation Perdue... (a Lost Generation) A Modern Nation Technology Modernist Literature Further Reading: Additional Secondary Sources Robert Frost Wallace Stevens William Carlos Williams Ezra Pound Marianne Moore T. S. Eliot Edna St. Vincent Millay E. E. Cummings F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Arthur Miller Southern Renaissance – First Wave Ellen Glasgow William Faulkner Eudora Alice Welty The Harlem Renaissance Jessie Redmon Fauset Zora Neale Hurston Nella Larsen Langston Hughes Countee Cullen Jean Toomer American Literature Since 1945 (1945 - Present) Southern Literary Renaissance - Second Wave (1945-1965) The Cold War and the Southern Literary Renaissance Economic Prosperity The Civil Rights Movement in the South New Criticism and the Rise of the MFA Program Innovation Tennessee Williams James Dickey Flannery O'Connor Postmodernism Theodore Roethke Ralph Ellison James Baldwin Allen Ginsberg Adrienne Rich Toni Morrison Donald Barthelme Sylvia Plath Don Delillo Alice Walker Leslie Marmon Silko David Foster Wallace

Since the 1970s, the degrowth idea has been proposed by scholars, public intellectuals and activists as a powerful call to reject the obsession of neoliberal capitalism with economic growth, an obsession which continues apace despite the global ecological crisis and rising inequalities. In the past decade, degrowth has gained momentum and become an umbrella term for various social movements which strive for ecologically sustainable and socially just alternatives that would transform the world we live in. How to move forward in an informed way, without reproducing the existing hierarchies and injustices? How not to end up in a situation when ecological sustainability is the prerogative of the privileged, direct democracy is ignorant of environmental issues, and localisation of production is xenophobic? These are some of the questions that have inspired this edited collection. Bringing degrowth into dialogue with critical social theories, covering previously unexplored geographical contexts and discussing some of the most contested concepts in degrowth, the book hints at informed paths towards socio-ecological transformation.

Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought--gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic--interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran's approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what's granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird's-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.