Cover image for Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction : Environment and Affect.
Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction : Environment and Affect.
Title:
Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction : Environment and Affect.
Author:
Houser, Heather.
ISBN:
9780231537360
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (219 pages)
Series:
Literature Now
Contents:
Cover -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1. Ecosickness -- Sickness in a Technoscientific Age -- Life, Ethics, and Action -- Ecosickness in the Field -- Outline of the Book -- 2. AIDS Memoirs Out of the City: Discordant Natures -- Prologue -- Contested Natures -- North Enough's "Difficult Beauties" -- The "Con" in Close to the Knives -- Discordant Feelings, Suspicious Stances -- Discord in Activism -- 3. Richard Powers's Strange Wonder -- "Weirdly Alive" with Wonder -- "The Ordinary by Another Name" -- "Struggling with Complex Interactions" -- "The Ethic of Tending" -- 4. Infinite Jest's Environmental Case for Disgust -- Detached Dispositions -- "Experial" Ambitions -- Body Building -- Affective Itineraries -- How to Do Things with Disgust -- 5. The Anxiety of Intervention in Leslie Marmon Silko and Marge Piercy -- Disrupting the "Pattern of Disease" -- "A Single Configuration" of Land and Body -- Iniquitous Interventions -- Anxious Apocalypse -- Squirming and Trembling -- Conclusion: How Does It Feel? -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.
Abstract:
The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode's crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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