Close Reading the Anthropocene

<p>Reading poetry and prose, images and art, literary and critical theory, science and cultural studies, <i>Close Reading the Anthropocene</i> explores the question of meaning, its importance and immanent potential for loss, in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. Both close reading and scientific ecology prioritize slowing down and looking around to apprehend similarities and differences, to recognize and value interconnections. Here "close" suggests careful attention to both the reading subject and read "object." Moving between places, rocks, plants, animals, atmosphere, and eclipses, this interdisciplinary edited collection grounds the complex relations between text and world in the environmental humanities. </p><p>The volume’s wide-ranging chapters are critical, often polemical, engagements with the question of the Anthropocene and the changing conversation around reading, interpretation, and textuality. They exemplify a range of work from across the globe and will be of great interest to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and literary studies.</p> <p>Introduction: Helena Feder, "The Unbearable Closeness of Reading" 1. "Inhabiting Words, Inhabiting Worlds: A Case for Pragmatist Close Reading", Amelia Marini 2. "Ecopoetics and The Myth of Motivated Form", Greg Garrard & Rina Garcia Chua 3. "Assembling the Archive: Close(ly) Reading Great Auk Extinction with Walton Ford", Nicole Merola 4. "Bartleby and the Politics of Measurement", Helena Feder 5. "Close Reading at the End of Time", Mark Long 6. "Postcolonial Anthropocene and Narrative Archaeology in <i>Burma Boy", </i>Senayon Olaoluwa 7. "Key West in the Anthropocene: Stevens and Bishop Close Read Florida", Peter Balaam 8. "The Tree as Archive: George Nakashima and the Nuclear Age", Isabel Duarte-Gray 9. "Going Underground: In Defense of Deep Reading", Graham Huggan 10. "Reading in the Dark: Eclipse as Hidden Commons in Tsing, Carson, and Dillard", Hilary Thompson 11. "Passing Strange", Tim Clark 12. "From Scale to Antagonism: Reading the Human in Vonnegut's Galapagos", C. Parker Krieg</p>