Chapter 10: Environmental Literary Studies

Question 1

Who said “Climate crisis is a failure of the imagination”?

Answer 1

Amitav Gosh (2016)

Question 2

Who said “poetry can counter greed, narcissism, and blind destruction”?

Answer 2

Brenda Hillman (2015)

Question 3

Who wrote The Defence of Poetry

Answer 3

• Percy Shelley
• the great instrument of moral good is imagination

Question 4

Blockiada (Klein, 2015)

Answer 4

popular resistance to modernist development planning ex: Save Beeliar Wetlands (2017)

Question 5

Who says “equating literature;s ability to change minds with social change is overenthusiastic”?

Answer 5

• Timothy Clark
• ideas dont cause change alone

Question 6

Beautiful

Answer 6

• smooth, symmetrical, delicate, light, and familiar
• provokes feelings of peace, joy, and happiness

Question 6

Sublime

Answer 6

• rough, rugged, massive, mysterious, and wild
• provokes feelings of awe, reverence, terror, and euphoria

Question 7

Picturesque

Answer 7

• Landscape looks like a picture
• evokes the pleasure of contrasts and nature
• fairly regular with pleasing irregularity

Question 8

CliFi

Answer 8

• climate fiction
• speculative narratives about what climate change is doing/may do to environments

Question 9

British Romantic Period

Answer 9

• 1789-1832
• Initiated a new appreciation of nature in response to industrialization
• Set action in new worlds
• contrasts nature and urbanization
• Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Question 10

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (Wordsworth, 1800)

Answer 10

• acceptance of the interconnected web of nature humans are embedded in
• like the rest of creation we are bodies that emerge from the earth and return to it

Question 11

Pastoral (Garrard, 2012)

Answer 11

evokes an idealized European nature that is idyllic, peaceful, abundantly harmonious, and picturesque

Question 12

Wilderness (Garrard, 2012)

Answer 12

• a place of exile, suffering, and evil
• untamed landscapes

Question 13

Who says wilderness is a place of freedom where we can discover our true selves?

Answer 13

• William Cronon (1996)
• ultimate landscape of authenticity
• unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization

Question 14

Apocolypse (Buell, 1995)

Answer 14

• suggest a titanic struggle between good and evil
• a prophetic warning to change our behavior before its too late
• the most powerful metaphor the contemporary environmental imagination has

Question 15

Going Bush (Theodore Roosevelt)

Answer 15

• shedding civilizations false temptations to confront reality in its purest form
• 19th century adventurists and survivalists

Question 16

How can we read environmental literature?

Answer 16

• ask what specific idea of nature is represented, where it came from, and how it shaped future thinking
• participate in the text’s imaginative work of constructing an environment

Question 17

Thinking Complexity

Answer 17

looking for the reciprocal yet contradictory and unequal relations that sustain a system

Question 18

Scale Framing (Heise, 2008)

Answer 18

• considering how small systems are always nestled within larger systems
• what is sustainable at one level may be unsustainable or immoral at another

Question 19

Thinking Like A Mountain (Leopold, 1949)

Answer 19

A sound links each listener in a web of unequal relations (competing, predatory, symbiotic, and parasitic) that together encompases a whole (the mountain ecosystem) greater than the sum of its individual members `

Question 20

Environmental Unconsciousness (Buell, 2009)

Answer 20

a knowledge of interconnectedness/coexistence suggested in a text

Question 21

Eco Critcism

Answer 21

• aims to expose a text’s ecological thought which is often ignored, concealed, or repressed
• studies the relationship between literature and the physical environment
• John Muir founded the Sierra Club and persuaded Roosevelt to preserve Yosemite
• Wordsworth inspired UK’s Land Trust movement
  -preservationism

Question 22

Aldo Leopold

Answer 22

• animal ecologist
• Game Management (1933)
• A Sand Country Almanac (1949)
• ecological thinking should drive economics and ethics
• economic thinkers abuse land

Question 23

Green Imperialism

Answer 23

• extending power over the biosphere
• the cataloging and reorganization of biota that accompanies all empires

Question 24

What did Doughtery (2015) say about environmental humanities and imperialism?

Answer 24

environmental humanities informed by postcolonial theory investigates the ecological violence and displacement in the history of globalism and imperialism

Question 25

A Space in Place and Practice of the Wild (Snyder 2008)

Answer 25

• how modern humans can reinhabit Earth
• being attentive to the interdependent matrix of wild creatures sustaining the places we live
• learning to dwell/dwelling

Question 26

Post humanism

Answer 26

• looks at how literature engages our definition of “the human,” human exceptionalism, and athropocentrism
• challenges the idea of humans as separate from nature

Question 27

New Materialism

Answer 27

attends to the way literature represents matter as having a kind of agency that is generally reserved for humans

Question 28

Who theorized Dwelling as the foundation for ecological ethics?

Answer 28

Heidegger and Naess