Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis (eBook)

Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis analyzes environmental literature and film from a tranversal ecocritical orientation with a focus on the aesthetic dimensions in terms of persuasive affects. It emphasizes attention to crucial themes, such as climate change, land dispossession, and differential gender impacts of global economics, as well as scenarios of possible sustainable futures.

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Persuasive Aesthetic Ecocritical Praxis continues Patrick D. Murphys focus on transversal ecocritical praxis by considering literature and cinema in terms of the persuasive force of aesthetic activity and whether or not artistic production and its criticism can be considered forms of activism. Murphy argues that literature and other forms of aesthetic production hold out the promise of being able to move some individuals deeply through both affective and intellectual engagement in ways that facilitate ideological reflection. To analyze aesthetic production ecocritically requires a transversal orientation in order to work continuously at accommodating a vast array of often seemingly disparate perspectives, disciplines, and contextual information, as well as the ever changing thematic, plot, setting, and contextual elements of the aesthetic works under consideration and the responses of changing audiences through time and across cultures. Murphy demonstrates this approach through presenting theories of transversality and applying them with attention to issues of propaganda, agitation, and persuasion, both in terms of artistic production and the criticism of such production. He also brings an ecofeminist orientation to the fore with particular attention to the gendered economic aspects of environmental issues in an age of land grabs and plantation economies. Along the way he treats a wide range of literary works, films and miniseries. In American literature he discusses realist and science fiction works, from Susan Fenimore Coopers Rural Hours to Paolo Bacigalupis The Windup Girl, Barbara Kingsolvers Flight Behavior to Kim Stanley Robinsons 2312, and Ana Castillos So Far from God to Leslie Marmon Silkos Gardens in the Dunes. In international literature, he analyzes Mo Yans The Garlic Ballads, Jiang Rongs Wolft Totem, Michiko Ishimures The Lake of Heaven, Miyuki Miyabes All She Was Worth, and other novels. The book concludes with a reading of Ernest Callenbachs Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging, an Afterword recommending further directions for transversal ecocritical research an and interview that discusses Murphys previous book, Transversal Ecocritical Praxis, and provides some personal background on the author.