What follows are notes from the first day of Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, and Ecocinema. These are, needless to say, my own hastily drawn up notes (and I’m still a little jet-lagged from my arrival yesterday). Forgive the point form and abbreviation inconsistencies. Any errors are my own; any wonderful ideas are other people’s, unless […]
Posts Tagged ‘ecocriticism’
Moving Environments, Day 1
Posted in Cinema, tagged affect, documentaries, ecocinema, ecocriticism, film on July 22, 2011 | 3 Comments »
lines in ecocritical sands
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecocriticism on May 5, 2010 | 4 Comments »
Greg Garrard, who’s become something of a point-man for synoptic treatments of ecocriticism (like this one, and see my previous post on him), has come out with a lucid and judicious review of recent publications in The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory. It covers the years 2007-8, which Garrard, in an email to […]
cinema, ontology, ecology
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecology, film, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »
I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]
Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecopolitics, film, Hollywood, ideology, paganism, pantheism on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »
New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.
But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]
cinematic ecologies
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Philosophy, tagged Agamben, ecocriticism, ecomedia, film, Heidegger on July 11, 2009 | 7 Comments »
As ecocriticism expands and deepens in scope (of subject matter & media examined), extent (internationally), and diversity (in approaches, connections with other schools of thought, etc.), its interactions with non-literary fields such as cinema studies, theatre/performance studies, and musicology (as I posted about recently) are starting to develop in healthy ways. The ASLE conference had […]
earth songs: Michael Jackson’s cultural ecologies
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged ecocriticism, ecology of culture, ecomedia, music on June 30, 2009 | 13 Comments »
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8muMo0fw_M&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1 The death of Michael Jackson has prompted eco-bloggers to take another look at Jackson’s 1995 “Earth Song“, which some consider the most popular environmentally themed song ever produced. The song remains Jackson’s biggest seller in the U.K, having sold over a million copies there — more than either “Thriller” or “Billie Jean” — but […]
more ASLE observations
Posted in Eco-culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecotheory on June 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Intrigued by the number of times the name of Bruno Latour came up in conversations at the ASLE conference, I counted the mentions of different theorists and philosophers (i.e., not literary writers, artists, et al.) in the titles of conference papers and presentations. (Unfortunately, neither the program nor the conference website provides full abstracts. Note […]
ASLE’s rabbits & cougars, or whither ecocriticism?
Posted in Eco-culture, Philosophy, Politics, tagged ecocriticism, ecopolitics, ecotheory on June 5, 2009 | 8 Comments »
There are rabbits all over the lawns of the University of Victoria campus. Like little furry grass-eating balls, they scurry forward a little from time to time but otherwise placidly chomp away at the lawns, oblivious to humans or anything else. Sometimes they just sit there, or lay themselves out and stare forward, cutely extending […]
free access to ISLE until May 15
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ecocriticism on March 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, which has been the leading forum for what’s come to be known as “ecocriticism” over the past 15 years or so, has finally caught up with the times and gone digital, thanks to the deal it arranged with its new publisher, Oxford. To celebrate the transition, all issues […]
About this blog
Posted in Blog stuff, Process-relational thought, tagged becoming, ecocriticism, environmental communication, immanence, immanent naturalism, Ontology, epistemology, political ecology on February 26, 2009 | 36 Comments »
An online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives: (1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice, especially at the interdisciplinary junctures forming in and around the fields of ecocriticism , green cultural studies, political ecology, environmental communication, ecophilosophy, and related areas (biosemiotics, […]
On ground and groundlessness: Jamesonian Marxism v. Derridean deconstruction v. Buddhist onto-phenomenalism (w/ guest appearances by Lacan and Freud, spiked all the way through with ecology)
Posted in Eco-theory, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, Derrida, ecocriticism, Jameson, Madhyamika, Marxism, psychoanalysis, theory, Zizek on February 6, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Or, Toward an eco-Buddhist-processualist cultural criticism Note: This is work in progress and probably won’t be published for a while, and not in this form in any case. It comes from an attempt to theorize an ‘ecocritical’ understanding of culture that is in dialogue with the Marxist tradition of social and political analysis, Derridean poststructural […]
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