1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910816977003321

Autore

Usher Phillip John

Titolo

Exterranean : Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene / / Phillip John Usher

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2019]

©2019

ISBN

0-8232-8605-3

0-8232-8423-9

0-8232-8424-7

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (223 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Meaning Systems

Disciplina

809/.9336

809.9336

Soggetti

Ecocriticism

Human ecology

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

This edition previously issued in print: 2019.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Figures -- Incipit: From sub- to exterranean -- Chapter 1. Terra has standing -- Chapter 2. Terre's brilliant mines -- Chapter 3. Terra globalized -- Chapter 4. Sickly mountainsides -- Chapter 5. Demonic mines -- Chapter 6. Geomedia -- Chapter 7. Saline intimacies -- Explicit -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub- to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. By shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, Usher reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within. The book thus maps the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily.Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, Usher instead elaborates a productive tension between the materially-situated homo of



nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene. In dialogue with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and other interdisciplinary work in the environmental humanities, Usher shows what premodern material can offer to contemporary theory. Examining textual and visual culture alike, Usher explores works by Ronsard, Montaigne, and Rabelais, early scientific works by Paracelsus and others, as well as objects, engravings, buildings, and the Salt Mines of Wieliczka. Both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.