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Full Description
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).
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The State of Environmental Literary Criticism
Ecocriticism between the Disciplines
Is There Some World in This Text? - Ecocriticism and Ecocritique
Environmental Texts and Literary Ecology
3. Postcolonial Literature and the 'Event of Fiction'
4. A Good Dose of Formalism? Reading The Hungry Tide
Focalisation and Narrative Deep Structure
Gaps and Tensions
Towards a Cautious Hermeneutics
5. Facets of EnvironMentality
6. The Uses of F(r)iction: The Heart of Redness, The Whale Caller and their Critique of Sustainable Development and Becoming-Animal
7. Negotiating the Human-Animal Boundary: Intertextuality and Metafiction in Life of Pi and Beatrice and Virgil
8. "Zero Time" and the Apocalypse: Postnatural Survival in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood
9. Posthumanism and the Wounded Being: 'Transformative Mimesis' in The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello
10. Towards and Beyond a Conclusion
Can Books Save the World?
From Ego to Eco - and Back Again: The Challenge of Reading the World
Bibliography
Index
