Earth Muse


Book Description

In Earth Muse, Carol Bigwood describes what she sees as a suppression of the feminine in Western culture, technology, and philosophy and opens a feminist postmodern space from which new differences may emerge. Drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and significant alternative feminist thought (such as French feminism, maternal philosophy, and ecofeminism), she explores underdeveloped themes in American and Canadian feminism. Bigwood's style is self-questioning and descriptive; she (writes) plays on the margins between philosophy and literature, between serious analysis and humor. The author offers a deconstruction of the phallocentric dichotomies of nature and culture, self and other, and the concepts of power, action, and making. Affirming the deep relations between the oppression of women, the exploitation of the earth, and the oppression of people of color, Bigwood cautiously attempts to reconceptualize the natural cultural situation of human begins in a way that is not built on domination or essentialist structures. Between the chapters she describes and illustrates four monumental artworks that are "written with the body and are pregnant with poetic-philosophic depths." Author note: Carol Bigwood is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Toronto.




Black on Earth


Book Description

American environmental literature has relied heavily on the perspectives of European Americans, often ignoring other groups. In Black on Earth, Kimberly Ruffin expands the reach of ecocriticism by analyzing the ecological experiences, conceptions, and desires seen in African American writing. Ruffin identifies a theory of "ecological burden and beauty" in which African American authors underscore the ecological burdens of living within human hierarchies in the social order just as they explore the ecological beauty of being a part of the natural order. Blacks were ecological agents before the emergence of American nature writing, argues Ruffin, and their perspectives are critical to understanding the full scope of ecological thought. Ruffin examines African American ecological insights from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century, considering WPA slave narratives, neo-slave poetry, novels, essays, and documentary films, by such artists as Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, Henry Dumas, Percival Everett, Spike Lee, and Jayne Cortez. Identifying themes of work, slavery, religion, mythology, music, and citizenship, Black on Earth highlights the ways in which African American writers are visionary ecological artists.




Phantom Planet Muse:Crisis of the earth in the 2050 year


Book Description

As for the earth, in the 2040s, with the technology of the silicon carbide which was included in the coming to practical use step, to make energy saving moved ahead in entering, the beginning in the 2010s and the atomic control technique made leaping progress. In the 2040s, the human race desired in the atomic beneficence and was reaching the atomic times which are at the height of prosperity. On the way which returns to NASA after spending the New Year holiday in Japan on January 3rd in 2050, Takeru and Rumi of the undergraduate arrived at San Francisco Airport in America. They were space Pilot's egg. When thinking whether or not it felt the shake of the disastrous earthquake for several seconds while resting at the airport lobby, the huge explosive sound as earsplitting in the moment occurred. The airplanes to be flying in the air began to collide in the air. Moreover, at the ground, it occurred in the place where the crash among the trains and the crash among the cars result and surely, it took on an aspect as it sees hell. Moreover, 5 minutes later, the time speed of the earth had begun to decline gradually. The body that the influence of the extraordinary magnetic field began to shrink Naotsune in the sun gradually and to have come and for the distribution of the dark matter which exists at the interplanetary in the solar system which was keeping a balance to have begun a malfunction in the past As for the earthquake with mighty magnitude 9.0 which occurred in San Francisco on January 3rd in 2050, the nuclear reactor in all-America each place made a meltdown occur in the influence of the earthquake. After that, the shocking truth that the energy of the huge atomic-explosion did a leak to the superconductive cable which was set up around the all-America mainland through the power-transmission wire at the exploded nuclear power plant and that it caused the huge extraordinary magnetic field came to light. Most of the machines by which a computer system and an IC chip all over the world were embedded were cruelly, too, destroyed and all the information of the person, goods, the money had disappeared with the occurrence of the huge magnetic field this time. Moreover, in the whole world, the atomic dust of radioactivity material diffused, and the human race sheltered in the shelter which got ready in the underground depth and became the status that it cannot help being content with the cellar life. In the next day of the worldwide destruction which is due to the extraordinary magnetic field, the leader in the whole world gathered to the United Nations and reviewed the ideal way of the world in the future. As a result, it resulted in the conclusion that there is a alternative only in only 6 month grace's there being and immigrating to the other planet even if it estimates the shelter life of the human race long. It is an immigration to the twin earth. After that, the formation to seem a huge spacecraft by the distant sky in each main city in the whole world *of* showed the appearance. It is the group of the spaceman who did the appearance of the human race and the Tweedledum and Tweedledee that appeared at the ground from the inside of the formation of the spacecraft which was staying in the of metropolis sky. They called the earth in the twin planet which they live in Muses. It said that it came to sense the critical status of the earth this time via 200 pieces of Mannen and to extend a hand. Takeru and Rumi were chosen as the selection member and about 1 month as Team Member which scouts the other party, stayed at the earth in the twin planet. In the story of the Muses person, they seem equipped with the ability for the elasticity of the speed in the time to be able to be controlled, being free by the individual level. Therefore, it is possible for night to rejuvenate the age if it takes medicine for the rejuvenation, Powers, by 1 tablet if it can be chosen, being free and wanting to return in the young period. Likewise, if swallowing Powers for aging if wanting to return to the elderly, it is possible to be transformed into the elderly. Saying that it prepares for the interior of the body in the associating time machine feature in the past, the future at present In Muses which the genetic engineering cleared up by developing exceedingly and multiplying 10 pieces of Mannen all of the mysteries of the life-phenomenon, it is the society which can control a life perfectly. The love is a free love and the concept, the marriage, doesn't exist. Its copy can be created by making cultivate it while being in home using the life hatch equipment, too. A born double is already transplanted in the experience and the memory like him. Because the speed in the time can be controlled, there are not concepts such as the productivity and the value, the efficiency, too, in Muses and the one which becomes the root of the various evils such as the money, too, doesn't exist. However, in Muses, the population increased explosively and reached 100 times the earth, too. It is in the water resources and the source of protein in the rich earth that they aimed secretly. The terrestrial kind immigrated to Muses and was immersed to the life of the paradise in Muses but it had begun to notice a sense of incongruity. There, it was dense or the god of the omniscient and almighty evil in the galactic system at the four dimensions space boiled and was making the holocaust plan of the earth people-out progress.




To See the Earth Before the End of the World


Book Description

Winner of the Voelcker Award (PEN America) (2016) In To See the Earth Before the End of the World Ed Roberson presents us with 120 new poems, each speaking in his unique voice and seen through his unique eye. Earth and sky, neighborhood life and ancient myths, the art of seeing and the architecture of the imagination are all among the subjects of these poems. Recurring images and ideas construct a complex picture of our world, ourselves, and the manifold connections tying them together. The poems raise large questions about the natural world and our place in it, and they do not flinch from facing up to those questions. Roberson's poems range widely through different scales of time and space, invoking along the way history and myth, galaxies and garbage trucks, teapots and the history of photography, mating cranes and Chicago's political machine. This collection is composed of five sequences, each developing a particular constellation of images and ideas related to the vision of the whole. Various journeys become one journey—an epic journey, invoking epic themes. There are songs of creation, pictures of the sorrows of war, celebrations of human labor and human society, a respect for tools and domestic utensils that are well made, the deep background of the past tingeing the colors of the present, and the tragic tones of endings and laments, a pervading awareness of the tears in things. Most of all, there is the exhilaration of a grand, sweeping vision that enlarges our world.




Earth Emotions


Book Description

As climate change and development pressures overwhelm the environment, our emotional relationships with Earth are also in crisis. Pessimism and distress are overwhelming people the world over. In this maelstrom of emotion, solastalgia, the homesickness you have when you are still at home, has become, writes Glenn A. Albrecht, one of the defining emotions of the twenty-first century. Earth Emotions examines our positive and negative Earth emotions. It explains the author's concept of solastalgia and other well-known eco-emotions such as biophilia and topophilia. Albrecht introduces us to the many new words needed to describe the full range of our emotional responses to the emergent state of the world. We need this creation of a hopeful vocabulary of positive emotions, argues Albrecht, so that we can extract ourselves out of environmental desolation and reignite our millennia-old biophilia—love of life—for our home planet. To do so, he proposes a dramatic change from the current human-dominated Anthropocene era to one that will be founded, materially, ethically, politically, and spiritually on the revolution in thinking being delivered by contemporary symbiotic science. Albrecht names this period the Symbiocene. With the current and coming generations, "Generation Symbiocene," Albrecht sees reason for optimism. The battle between the forces of destruction and the forces of creation will be won by Generation Symbiocene, and Earth Emotions presents an ethical and emotional odyssey for that victory.




Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth


Book Description

In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited excellence—beliefs about descent from gods or heroes—is elaborated and challenged. Rose offers subtle and penetrating new readings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Pindar's Tenth Pythian Ode, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Sophokles' Philoktetes, and Plato's Republic. Rose rejects the view of art as a mere reflection of social and political reality—a view that is characteristic not only of most Marxist but of most historically oriented treatments of classical literature. He applies instead a Marxian hermeneutic derived from the work of the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson. His readings focus on illuminating a politics of form within the text, while responding to historically specific social, political, and economic realities. Each work, he asserts, both reflects contemporary conflicts over wealth, power, and gender roles and constitutes an attempt to transcend the status quo by projecting an ideal community. Following Marx, Rose maintains that critical engagement with the limitations of the utopian dreams of the past is the only means to the realization of freedom in the present. Classicists and their students, literary theorists, philosophers, comparatists, and Marxist critics will find Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth challenging reading.




Cinema and Classical Texts


Book Description

This book interprets films as visual texts and demonstrates the affinities between Greco-Roman literature and the cinema.




The Ethics of Earth Art


Book Description

"In The Ethics of Earth Art, Amanda Boetzkes analyzes the development of the earth art movement, arguing that such diverse artists as Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, James Turrell, Jackie Brookner, Olafur Eliasson, Basia Irland, and Ichi Ikeda are connected through their elucidation of the earth as a domain of ethical concern. Boetzkes contends that in basing their works' relationship to the natural world on receptivity rather than representation, earth artists take an ethical stance that counters both the instrumental view that seeks to master nature and the Romantic view that posits a return to a mythical state of unencumbered continuity with nature. By incorporating receptive surfaces into their work - film footage of glaring sunlight, an aperture in a chamber that opens to the sky, or a porous armature on which vegetation grows - earth artists articulate the dilemma of representation that nature presents."--pub. desc.




Rare Earth Frontiers


Book Description

"Rare Earth Frontiers is a timely text. As Klinger notes, rare earths are neither rare nor technically earths, but they are still widely believed to be both. Although her approach focuses on the human, or cultural, geography of rare earths mining, she does not ignore the geological occurrence of these mineral types, both on Earth and on the moon.... This volume is excellently organized, insightfully written, and extensively sourced."―Choice Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation. Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon.




Ecospirit


Book Description

We hope—even as we doubt—that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species’ self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing—but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity. This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. With a fresh, transdisciplinary approach, Ecospirit probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism’s questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these original essays explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting. In the midst of planetary crisis, they activate imagination, humor, ritual, and hope.