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Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept
The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged.
Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the "Anthropocene", which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.
Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the "Anthropocene", which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.
- GenresPhilosophyNonfiction
232 pages, Paperback
First published September 24, 2015
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About the author
Timothy Clark
10 books4 followersTimothy Clark is a specialist in the environmental humanities and deconstruction.
Professor Clark's current work is engaged in the ways in which many environmental issues could be said to deconstruct some of the bases of modern Western thought. Crucial questions are: whether it makes sense to extend notions of "rights" beyond humanity; the challenge of representing environmental issues that elude the normal scales of human thought and perception; the status of personification, metaphor, emotive language and the literal in environmentalist writing; the possibility or impossibility of thinking or writing non-anthropocentrically; the limits of modes of oppositional politics for addressing environmental issues; the evasion of climate change in ecocriticism itself; the question of whether the predominantly liberal and seemingly "progressive" modes of current literary criticism are still tied to an essentially destructive understanding of the human species....?.
Clark has been a leading figure in the development of new modes of literary criticism engaged with the intellectual revolution inseparable from thinking of climate change. His recent The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was "Book of the Week" in the "Times Higher Educational Supplement" for June 20th 2019.
Professor Clark has published many articles in literary and philosophical journals and eight monographs. These are Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford UP, 1989); Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge UP, 1992, 2008); The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester UP, 1997, 2000); Charles Tomlinson (Northcote House, 1999); Martin Heidegger, Routledge Critical Thinkers Series (Routledge, 2001, second ed. 2012); The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh UP, 2005); The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge, 2011); Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London Bloomsbury, 2015). He has recently edited a special of The Oxford Literary Review (38.1; July 2016) on the controversial issue of overpopulation.
Professor Clark's work has been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.
Professor Clark's current work is engaged in the ways in which many environmental issues could be said to deconstruct some of the bases of modern Western thought. Crucial questions are: whether it makes sense to extend notions of "rights" beyond humanity; the challenge of representing environmental issues that elude the normal scales of human thought and perception; the status of personification, metaphor, emotive language and the literal in environmentalist writing; the possibility or impossibility of thinking or writing non-anthropocentrically; the limits of modes of oppositional politics for addressing environmental issues; the evasion of climate change in ecocriticism itself; the question of whether the predominantly liberal and seemingly "progressive" modes of current literary criticism are still tied to an essentially destructive understanding of the human species....?.
Clark has been a leading figure in the development of new modes of literary criticism engaged with the intellectual revolution inseparable from thinking of climate change. His recent The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was "Book of the Week" in the "Times Higher Educational Supplement" for June 20th 2019.
Professor Clark has published many articles in literary and philosophical journals and eight monographs. These are Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford UP, 1989); Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge UP, 1992, 2008); The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester UP, 1997, 2000); Charles Tomlinson (Northcote House, 1999); Martin Heidegger, Routledge Critical Thinkers Series (Routledge, 2001, second ed. 2012); The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh UP, 2005); The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge, 2011); Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London Bloomsbury, 2015). He has recently edited a special of The Oxford Literary Review (38.1; July 2016) on the controversial issue of overpopulation.
Professor Clark's work has been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 28, 2022
We're fucked lads. We were fucked from the moment we picked up two rocks and banged them together.
An interesting discussion on the challenge of writing about the environment in a way that's actually meaningful. Seems the scale of the climate emergency is now so MASSIVE that it has to be simplified in order to be engaged with, but not so much that it doesn't feel big enough to seriously worry about.
A toughie! That's for sure!
At its best when it directly engages with with obscure short stories from the 90s. A lot of the time outside of that it's held back just by the fundamental writing style. I feel like the general reader is being boxed out of some genuinely worthwhile discourse in the name of Too Many Long Words.
Like,,, bro. It's not only possible to write about literary theory in a page-turning way; it's allowed. You don't have to use so many subordinate clauses. You can write in simple sentences. It's okay. I am giving you permission. Do not be afraid.
An interesting discussion on the challenge of writing about the environment in a way that's actually meaningful. Seems the scale of the climate emergency is now so MASSIVE that it has to be simplified in order to be engaged with, but not so much that it doesn't feel big enough to seriously worry about.
A toughie! That's for sure!
At its best when it directly engages with with obscure short stories from the 90s. A lot of the time outside of that it's held back just by the fundamental writing style. I feel like the general reader is being boxed out of some genuinely worthwhile discourse in the name of Too Many Long Words.
Like,,, bro. It's not only possible to write about literary theory in a page-turning way; it's allowed. You don't have to use so many subordinate clauses. You can write in simple sentences. It's okay. I am giving you permission. Do not be afraid.
August 9, 2023
3.5. The book really is not bad at all. Oh, it's repetitive: Clark does not tire of underlining the emergent properties of scale effects which have as their consequence the derangement of given ways of thinking, in turn resulting in the vertiginous loss of proportion accompanied by involuntary breaches of decorum in a moralistic vein, etc. (If you've read the book, you'll get it.)
But maybe his points bear repeating. The thesis really is given away in the title: the anthropocene is not (mainly) dealt with in geological or whatever else terms, but as a concept, informing as it has been for some time now literary and cultural studies all over the dying world. Clark argues, basically, that its impact has not been nearly as meteoric as it should have been, as handed-down habits of thinking (e.g., what he calls 'methodological individualism/nationalism') still prevail over more adequate conceptions of our predicament, whatever those would be. Although suggestions are given, such as the radical enlargement of both temporal and spatial scale when dealing with, say, a literary text (his readings are actually very worthwhile), Clark's main point is that old conceptual habits are dying away (or should, at least), but with no proper replacement yet in sight. Thus the vertigo. I like this way of tackling the problem, although what holds for the cultural applies to the philosophical as well: its importance, especially against some indispensable form of action, should not be overstated. Still, it seems to me as important as anything to be able to grasp in some basic sense not only what is 'going on', but also what that's 'doing to' (or not!) modes of representation, culture, discourse if you will; to grope for ways of dealing with the mess intellectually at least. What Clark is offering in this respect, though, is ... meager (there's something to be said here about the interplay of difference and repetition: repetition does not equal fleshing out, which is what introducing difference would accomplish; maybe the repetition is simply a function, to speak frankly, of the embarrassment that he didn't quite manage (at that time—who knows, 8 years have passed) to constitute a full-fledged autonomous concept, which would subsist and reproduce on its own and not be in need of the artificial life support that is mantra-like reiteration). It's a start, certainly, but no more than that; the concepts of scale, emergence, threshold, 'Anthropocene disorder' (naming the loss of proportion with all the symptoms it entails) are intriguing, but would need to be much more vigorously theorized in order to truly be capable of comprehension—and that's what we're ultimately after, is it not.
As I said in the beginning, the book's good enough; the language is sometimes sort of weird, a result, I believe, of a kind of stunted over-editing on his part, an ongoing apparent reflection on the linguistic subtleties of style and whatnot, but sadly often not quite to completion—there are mistakes in here for which the only explanation is that Clarke rewrote (and rewrote and rewrote) the sentence without then having a final look at, for instance, whether the superfluous words have all been removed. This makes them also sometimes tedious to read, as the language has been complicated, but not to the degree that it's somehow sensible again, if you know what I mean. Either infuse a text with all the mind you've got at your disposal—or don't at all; but don't stop halfway through. The general drift of his writing is resonating with me, though, and reading the book did definitely not feel like it was a waste of time, even if it wasn't as rewarding as I had hoped it to be. I will likely pick up his more recent work soon and certainly be on the lookout for any new publications. In sum: promising—but not it yet.
But maybe his points bear repeating. The thesis really is given away in the title: the anthropocene is not (mainly) dealt with in geological or whatever else terms, but as a concept, informing as it has been for some time now literary and cultural studies all over the dying world. Clark argues, basically, that its impact has not been nearly as meteoric as it should have been, as handed-down habits of thinking (e.g., what he calls 'methodological individualism/nationalism') still prevail over more adequate conceptions of our predicament, whatever those would be. Although suggestions are given, such as the radical enlargement of both temporal and spatial scale when dealing with, say, a literary text (his readings are actually very worthwhile), Clark's main point is that old conceptual habits are dying away (or should, at least), but with no proper replacement yet in sight. Thus the vertigo. I like this way of tackling the problem, although what holds for the cultural applies to the philosophical as well: its importance, especially against some indispensable form of action, should not be overstated. Still, it seems to me as important as anything to be able to grasp in some basic sense not only what is 'going on', but also what that's 'doing to' (or not!) modes of representation, culture, discourse if you will; to grope for ways of dealing with the mess intellectually at least. What Clark is offering in this respect, though, is ... meager (there's something to be said here about the interplay of difference and repetition: repetition does not equal fleshing out, which is what introducing difference would accomplish; maybe the repetition is simply a function, to speak frankly, of the embarrassment that he didn't quite manage (at that time—who knows, 8 years have passed) to constitute a full-fledged autonomous concept, which would subsist and reproduce on its own and not be in need of the artificial life support that is mantra-like reiteration). It's a start, certainly, but no more than that; the concepts of scale, emergence, threshold, 'Anthropocene disorder' (naming the loss of proportion with all the symptoms it entails) are intriguing, but would need to be much more vigorously theorized in order to truly be capable of comprehension—and that's what we're ultimately after, is it not.
As I said in the beginning, the book's good enough; the language is sometimes sort of weird, a result, I believe, of a kind of stunted over-editing on his part, an ongoing apparent reflection on the linguistic subtleties of style and whatnot, but sadly often not quite to completion—there are mistakes in here for which the only explanation is that Clarke rewrote (and rewrote and rewrote) the sentence without then having a final look at, for instance, whether the superfluous words have all been removed. This makes them also sometimes tedious to read, as the language has been complicated, but not to the degree that it's somehow sensible again, if you know what I mean. Either infuse a text with all the mind you've got at your disposal—or don't at all; but don't stop halfway through. The general drift of his writing is resonating with me, though, and reading the book did definitely not feel like it was a waste of time, even if it wasn't as rewarding as I had hoped it to be. I will likely pick up his more recent work soon and certainly be on the lookout for any new publications. In sum: promising—but not it yet.
December 10, 2024
I must confess, I skipped chapters 3 and 9 😂—so technically, it doesn’t fully count toward my reading challenge…. But book nr 20 coming soon
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews