Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World

Description

Cultures have long defined themselves through biological elements to prove their strength and longevity, from cherry blossoms in Japan to amber waves of grain in the United States. In Ecology without Culture, Christine L. Marran introduces the concept of biotropes-material and semiotic figures that exist for human perception-to navigate how and why

Christine L. Marran is professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Poison Woman: Figuring Female Transgression in Modern Japanese Culture (Minnesota, 2007).

"Ecology without Culture is a singular and incisive study that ambitiously reconfigures the aims and parameters of ecocriticism. Christine L. Marran urges us to be more skeptical about cultural claims, releasing the material world from the burden of representing cultural identities. She presents a bold case for interpreting in explicitly non-anthropencentric ways by being attentive to material agencies and scalar deviations."-Stacy Alaimo, author of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times "The text is an enriching read for students and scholars of environmentally engaged literary and cultural studies and adds a playful perspective both from Japanese and material ecocriticism."-KULT_online "Christine Marran's Ecology without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World is an absorbing, timely intervention into scholarship on literature/film and environment." -Journal of Japanese Studies