EnvironMentality: Ecocriticism and the Event of Postcolonial Fiction (Nature, Culture and Literature, 9) - Softcover

Bartosch, Roman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9042036672 ISBN 13: 9789042036673

Publisher: Brill Academic Pub, 2013

Synopsis

This book addresses the role and potential of literature in the process of contesting and re-evaluating concepts of nature and animality, describing one's individual environment as the starting point for such negotiations. It employs the notion of the 'literary event' to discuss the specific literary quality of verbal art conceptualised as EnvironMentality. EnvironMentality is grounded on the understanding that fiction does not explain or second scientific and philosophical notions but that it poses a fundamental challenge to any form of knowledge manifesting in processes determined by the human capacity to think beyond a given hermeneutic situation. Bartosch foregrounds the dialectics of understanding the other by means of literary interpretation in ecocritical readings of novels by Amitav Ghosh, Zakes Mda, Yann Martel, Margaret Atwood and J.M. Coetzee, arguing that EnvironMentality helps us as readers of fiction to learn from the books we read that which can only be learned by means of reading: to "think like a mountain" (Aldo Leopold) and to know "what it is like to be a bat" (Thomas Nagel).

About this title

About the Author:

Roman Bartosch teaches English literatures at the University of Cologne. He has published on ecocritical theory, (post)humanism and questions of literary quality and canonicity as well as edited a book on song lyrics in rock and metal music.

Review:

EnvironMentality gives ecocriticism a new angle by focusing on the properties and effectiveness of narrative and its ethical implications in an endangered natural environment. It is a deeply analytical, thought-provoking study that sees promise in the potentials of reading. -Christa Grewe-Volpp, Mannheim, in Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, vol. 26.1 2015, pp. 185-187"

"EnvironMentality gives ecocriticism a new angle by focusing on the properties and effectiveness of narrative and its ethical implications in an endangered natural environment. It is a deeply analytical, thought-provoking study that sees promise in the potentials of reading." -Christa Grewe-Volpp, Mannheim, in Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies, vol. 26.1 2015, pp. 185-187

About this edition

• Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 9042036672
• ISBN 13: 9789042036673
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 315