New Books in Environmental Studies
Science:Natural Sciences
While much recent ecocriticism has questioned the value of nature as a concept, Thought's Wilderness: Romanticism and the Apprehension of Nature (Stanford UP, 2022) insists that it is analytically and politically indispensable, and that romanticism shows us why. Without a concept of nature, Greg Ellermann argues, our thinking is limited to the world that capitalism has made.
Defamiliarizing the tradition of romantic nature writing, Ellermann contends that the romantics tried to circumvent the domination of nature that is essential to modern capitalism. As he shows, poets and philosophers in the period such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and Percy Shelley were highly attuned to nature's ephemeral, ungraspable forms: clouds of vapor, a trace of ruin, deep silence, and the "world-surrounding ether." Further, he explains how nature's vanishing—its vulnerability and its flight from apprehension—became a philosophical and political problem. In response to a nascent industrial capitalism, romantic writers developed a poetics of wilderness—a poetics that is attentive to fleeting presence and that seeks to let things be. Trying to imagine what ultimately eludes capture, the romantics recognized the complicity between conceptual and economic domination, and they saw how thought itself could become a technology for control. This insight, Ellermann proposes, motivates romantic efforts to think past capitalist instrumentality and its devastation of the world.
Ultimately, this new work undertakes a fundamental rethinking of the aesthetics and politics of nature.
Greg Ellermann is Lecturer in English at Yale University.
Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies
Hannah Freed-Thall, "Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Anaïs Maurer, "The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists" (Duke UP, 2023)
Krista E. Hughes et al., "Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice for an Entangled World" (Penn State UP, 2019)
Diana P. Parsell, "Eliza Scidmore: The Trailblazing Journalist Behind Washington's Cherry Trees" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Kevin Loughran, "Parks for Profit: Selling Nature in the City" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Thomas Zeller, "Consuming Landscapes: What We See When We Drive and Why It Matters" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2022)
Kristin J. Jacobson, "The American Adrenaline Narrative" (U Georgia Press, 2020)
Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Timothy Grieve-Carlson, "American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Timothy Barnard, "Singaporean Creatures: Histories of Humans and Other Animals in the Garden City" (NUS Press, 2024)
Samuel Dolbee, "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Oneka LaBennett, "Global Guyana: Shaping Race, Gender, and Environment in the Caribbean and Beyond" (NYU Press, 2024)
John Soluri, "Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia" (UNC Press, 2024)
Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)
Thomas Hendriks, "Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession" (Duke UP, 2021)
Elsa Devienne, "Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Siobhan Angus, "Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography" (Duke UP, 2024)
Johanna Oksala, "Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology" (Northwestern UP, 2023)
John Soluri, "Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States" (U Texas Press, 2021)
Tessa Hill and Eric Simons, "At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Philosophy
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies