Description
The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings. As efforts to prevent ecological and bodily injury aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. "Ecosickness fiction" imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological threats and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. With chapters on David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how narrative affects such as wonder and disgust organize perception of an endangered world and orient us ethically toward it. Houser connects contemporary literature, ecocriticism, affect studies, and the medical humanities and positions ecosickness fiction relative to technoscientific innovations and emergent forms of environmentalism.
About the Author
Heather Houser is associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.
Reviews
This sophisticated reconnaissance of an impressive range of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century works both adroitly builds upon and convincingly takes issue with the new 'materialist' ecocriticism by offering a subtly compelling assessment of the place of affect in works of environmental imagination and environmental intervention generally. Not contemporary U.S. fiction specialists alone, but ecocritics in all bailiwicks are sure to profit from Heather Houser's insights. -- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University The 'ecosickness' that Heather Houser explores offers yet another example of the dangers of humanity's efforts to 'master' nature. The novels and memoirs she studies demonstrate the intricate connections between somatic and ecological damage. Yet it is the literary critical argument that most distinguishes this work. Houser elegantly shows how these novels and memoirs produce narratives with unpredictable affects and how that unpredictability in turn generates an ethics that, she argues, might lead to new ways of addressing ecological damage. This timely book is crucial not only for its ecocritical insights, but for its depiction of the importance of humanistic inquiry to planetary ethics. -- Priscilla Wald, Duke University, author of Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative In its analytical poise and sharp close readings, Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction itself is a valuable addition to affect studies and ecocriticism. 49th Parallel This well-researched argument draws on psychology, sociology, cognitive science, and other disciplines to illuminate the contributions artists make in conversations--typically dominated by scientists, environmentalists, and politicians--about environmental policy, and aims to encourage and enrich those conversations. CHOICE Houser engages with affect theory to push the boundaries of material ecocriticism in an innovative and necessary direction... she insightfully complicates the role of "writer-activist" and asks her audience to consider critically what shape this activism might take and what its future might entail. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
Awards
Winner of A.S.A.P Book Award 2015. Short-listed for Book Prize 2014.
Book Information
ISBN 9780231165150
Author Heather Houser
Format Paperback
Page Count 328
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press