1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910826750303321

Autore

Wenzel Jennifer

Titolo

The Disposition of Nature : Environmental Crisis and World Literature / / Jennifer Wenzel

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2020]

©2019

ISBN

0-8232-8679-7

0-8232-8888-9

0-8232-8680-0

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (352 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

363.7009172/4

Soggetti

Environmental degradation - Developing countries

Nature in literature

Developing countries Environmental conditions

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Introduction. Reading for the planet -- Chapter 1. Consumption for the common good? commodity biography in an era of postconsumerism -- Chapter 2. Hijacking the imagination: how to tell the story of the Niger delta -- Chapter 3. From waste lands to wasted lives: enclosure as aesthetic regime and property regime -- Chapter 4. How far is bhopal? inconvenient forums and corporate comparison -- Epilogue. Fixing the world -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming. The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach



to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale. Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel’s book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.