Greg Garrard

Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy

Modernist Disanthropy It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of a good joke to have the end of moral dualism, and of the human alienation from the earth that followed from it, announced by Zarathustra, the very prophet who probably invented it: “I beseech you my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! ... Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go” (1982: 125). Sadly, either no one found it funny or it merely went unnoticed, forcing Nietzsche to clear the matter up, with injured irritation, in his megalomaniac self-commentary Ecce Homo:

The unbearable lightness of green: air travel, climate change and literature

Milan Kunderas ‘unbearable lightness of being’ is appropriated for ecocritical argument by quantifying demographically the sense of contingency it conveys: the more people there are, the lighter I feel, but the heavier we all are in ecological terms. Ian McEwans Solar, Michael Crichtons State of Fear and Helen Simpsons In-Flight Entertainment are considered in the light of the psychological, sociological and generic problems involved in the representation of climate change.

Introduction: "Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene"

In this cluster of essays, a group of scholars from different disciplines—History, Comparative Literature, American Studies, and Literature and Media Studies—offers reflections upon a broadly construed question: what does it mean for the humanities to address the concept of the Anthropocene? We have, quite intentionally, included essays that vary with regard to materials and approaches. What they share is a concern with the challenges of representing a concept at once wholly abstract and alarmingly material in aesthetically, rhetorically, and ultimately politically efficacious ways. They share as well a conviction that the humanities, in their attention to the creation and critique of aesthetic objects, can play a significant role in heightening public environmental awareness. The problem they collectively address is a curious, but pervasive one in environmentalism: why does it seem that widely accepted science and widely shared framing paradigms have such limited effect on the various public audiences that they attempt and need to reach? How, too, might that be changed? The claim that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene was first made by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000 (and elaborated upon by Crutzen in an article published in Nature in 2002). Originally defined as the age in which humanity came to have an impact upon long-term geological processes, it now stresses that our species has become a crucially significant factor in potentially cataclysmic climatological and biogeographical changes. Especially since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has exerted an increasingly powerful influence over the Earth’s ecosystems, changing not only the planet’s surface appearance, but also its chemistry and geology. Indeed, Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen and 1 P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18; P. J. Crutzen “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 6867 (2002): 23.

“Images adequate to our predicament”: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics

This paper discusses the idea of ‘ecopoetry’ by outlining its development from drawing on Romantic and deep ecological traditions in the 1980s to reflecting complex environmental concerns in the 20 ...

ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE APOCALYPTIC TRADITION

For at least three thousand years, a fluctuating proportion of the worlds population, mainly in Asia at first, then in Europe and latterly in North America, has believed that the end of the world was imminent. Scholars dispute its precise origins, but it seems likely that the distinctive construction of apocalyptic narratives that inflects much environmentalism today began in central Asia around 1200BCE, in the thought of the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. Notions of the worlds gradual decline or senescence were widespread in ancient civilisations, but Zoroaster bequeathed to modern Euro-American civilisation a sense of urgency about the demise of the world that has been highly influential in Jewish, Christian and later secular models of history. From the Zealots of Roman Judea through the Anabaptists of 16th century Munster to the Branch Davidians who perished in Waco, Texas in 1993, Judeo-

Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy

Ecocriticism extends, but also departs from, the long tradition of considering ‘English’ as charged with a countercultural ‘mission’. And both ecocriticism and the vision of a degree programme that prevails among politicians and business leaders construct higher education as urgent and instrumentalised. This chapter incites teachers to keep their pedagogic heads in a situation of environmental emergency. Teaching is not simply a process of transmitting the current state of knowledge, or inciting action according to already-known imperatives. The readings it fosters are both situated and embodied. We must reframe ecocritical pedagogy as a practice of emergency that holds urgency and emergence in creative tension; that consciously juxtaposes spatial and temporal scales in order to foster biospheric perception; that teaches quandaries, not received ecological truths; and that practises reflective close reading. The central argument is that, rather than a pre-given notion of sustainability directing our pedagogy, the ecopedagogy of the unprecedented will yield a provisional, dynamic practice of sustainability. In other words, our pedagogy should mould our politics, not the other way around.

Out of the earth: ecocritical readings of Irish texts

the greatest insights, of this book. It suffers and benefits from its status as an edited book, in almost equal measure. Despite the general narrative trajectory, Publishing Samuel Beckett is characterised by odd disjuncture, from the slightly confusing sense of chronology in the first section, where piecemeal publishing ventures disrupt the narrative thrust, to some fascinating inconsistencies over Beckett’s attitude to publicity (complicit with Grove, but reluctant with Minuit), that are left unexamined due to being split across different chapters. If these can be somewhat disorienting, and at time perhaps needlessly so, there is nonetheless something valuable in precisely this lack of coherence, for it throws up discontinuities and disorientations that might otherwise be glossed over. At the very least, such disjuncture helpfully underscores a central theme of the book: the often tortured and tortuous relationship of Beckett to his own publication, and of his publications to the literary world that received or ignored them.