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The Value of Ecocriticism
The Value of Ecocriticism offers a brief, incisive overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in a bewildering age of global environmental threat. The intellectual, moral and political complexity of environmental issues, especially at the global scale (the so-called 'Anthropocene') forms a new challenge of inventiveness for both literature and criticism. Ecocriticism has been going through a period of radical change and has become a diverse and huge field on the exciting but unstable boundary between the humanities and the sciences, with a mix of cultural, political, scientific and activist strands. Its mantra is that the environmental crisis demands a reconsideration of society's basic values, constitution and purposes, and that art and literature can be vital in that work. As a leading figure in this field, Timothy Clark surveys recent developments in ecocriticism lucidly, but also sometimes critically. This book examines ecopoetics, material ecocriticism, and the ideas of world literature as well as contentious claims that we are living in a new geological epoch.
- GenresTheory
198 pages, Paperback
Published February 7, 2019
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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 - 4 of 4 reviews
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September 20, 2023I usually don’t include theory / criticism but I read this goddamn book cover to cover so I’m fucking counting it
June 21, 2024
Ik zet altijd pas mijn "currently reading" op goodreads als ik weet dat ik het ga uitlezen #fake. Maar dus: enkele ogenblikken geleden las ik dit boek uit, nog steeds voor mijn thesis. Ik ben bijzonder tevreden dat ik het nog vond en las, zo aan het eind van juni, aangezien het mij een degelijk overzicht en een fris perspectief bood. Slaapwel.
December 2, 2023
Ecocriticism now has a pretty long pedigree, having been launched in the 1970s as a new approach to nature writing. Since then it has developed and sprouted other critical approaches, like the New Materialism and posthumanism (which fed off other streams as well). Timothy Clark's The Value of Ecocriticism offers an up-to-date review of the state of the field as of a few years ago.
Clark is well-positioned to offer this review; he's published widely in ecocriticism and, as his book attests, has read just about everything out there.
It must be said, though, that his approach is sometimes hypercritical and polemic. New Materialism comes in for especially harsh attacks; he argues that one of its central claims, that non-human entities, including non-living ones, express agency, is tendentious and pointless--that everyone has always recognized that agency, as when a branch falls off a tree and hits you in the head. This critique, however, misses the whole point of the New Materialist argument about agency, which addresses also the problem of intentionality. Here Clark is very unfair, to my mind, and his rather sarcastic language in making his case is off-putting.
The Value of Ecocriticism does provide a general introduction, and the new reader can get a sense of the field's past and current profile. But it should be read with a critical eye, his arguments carefully interrogated.
Clark is well-positioned to offer this review; he's published widely in ecocriticism and, as his book attests, has read just about everything out there.
It must be said, though, that his approach is sometimes hypercritical and polemic. New Materialism comes in for especially harsh attacks; he argues that one of its central claims, that non-human entities, including non-living ones, express agency, is tendentious and pointless--that everyone has always recognized that agency, as when a branch falls off a tree and hits you in the head. This critique, however, misses the whole point of the New Materialist argument about agency, which addresses also the problem of intentionality. Here Clark is very unfair, to my mind, and his rather sarcastic language in making his case is off-putting.
The Value of Ecocriticism does provide a general introduction, and the new reader can get a sense of the field's past and current profile. But it should be read with a critical eye, his arguments carefully interrogated.
October 4, 2019
Found the ecopoetics chapter to be convincing and informative, but ch 4 (prose narrative) really missed the mark, especially where genre fiction is concerned
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews