Sense Of Planet Research Articles

Planetary Los Angeles: Climate Realism and Transnational Narrative in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019)

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the fire-plagued Los Angeles of Amitav Ghosh’s 2019 novel Gun Island functions as a device to illuminate the planetary processes and continuities of climate change and the Anthropocene. I demonstrate the ways in which Ghosh makes metaphorical connections between the disparate settings of his novel – particularly L.A and the Sundarbans delta in the Bay of Bengal – to portray the Earth as a single living organism defined by environmental, ecological and social flux. As a consequence of this transnational narrative, Los Angeles becomes a symptom of planetary malaise rather than a distinct, bounded space. Analysing Gun Island primarily through the framework of Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinic and Jeff Diamanti’s conception of ‘climate realism’ – with reference also to Amy Elias and Christian Moraru’s ‘planetarity’ and Ursula Heise’s ‘sense of planet’ – I explain how the novel exhibits a contemporary realist form that rejects provincial thinking and advocates a planetary consciousness. Moreover, I contend that Gun Island departs from the long lineage of Los Angeles disaster literature, suggesting that Ghosh’s L.A does not expose national anxieties – as has often been the case in such fiction – but rather a planetary condition.

Stevens’s High Sentence for the End Time

Stevens’s High Sentence for the End Time Justin Quinn I THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS been ending. This ever-imminent finality turns our gaze periodically beyond particular communities— national, ethnic, or religious—to consider the world as such, or as a whole. Culture has helped us in this work—telling stories, providing images, alarming us, consoling us, informing us, misleading us—and its figurations are useful as much for politics as for the spiritual preparation they offer as we consider the extinction of our own species and a lot of others. The Anthropocene period is perhaps different in that humanity itself appears to be the main trigger of global destruction, although human proximity to the cause does not necessarily facilitate understanding; many humans find it difficult to face the global consequences of their actions, because the temporal and spatial scales are too vast, and culture tends to be produced and consumed in more restricted environments. Now, however, culture is learning to respond in new global terms that might help us, and, along with it, poetry criticism. But who is that “us” which confronts those issues? What kind of group faces the end of the world? Are we just individuals? Are we gathered in nations? Or other kinds of community? Because many critics are trained in a particular linguistic or national tradition, they try to answer this question within such a framework. For instance, Margaret Ronda, in her Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (2018), uses a national framework to understand poetry after World War II (“American” in her title does not refer to the continent but to the United States). Another work that makes a similar maneuver is Ursula K. Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008). While such national criticism is important, it is ultimately insufficient. After all, the crisis is global. The “us”—or community—that faces the crisis is the human population of the entire world. So we may need to start reading culture in more “worldly” terms, even though we may worry whether it is possible to posit, once again, the idea of universal address. Can we, for example, imagine a poem addressing readers globally? Can we imagine a poetry that figures the community of the entire earth as its audience? Is there a [End Page 10] culture, a possible world culture, that meets our gaze at such moments? Do we have cultural works that address the world? Theories of world literature and transnationalism may be of help, as they examine the speeds and patterns of literature as it circulates around the globe. They also alert us to the difficulties of such journeys, reminding us how a work or a writer, much prized within one culture, may not be viable in others. In what follows, I will argue that Wallace Stevens convokes a global audience, offering a kind of literature—which has been identified pejoratively as “high sentence”—that may be of help as we experience the end of the world, again. Such an “offer,” however, does not imply acceptance. Thus, as well as making a case for Stevens, in at least one mode, as an author for the Anthropocene, I will also outline some of the obstacles in the way. II What will we see when the end comes? Perhaps something like this: the whiteness folded into less,Like many robings, as moving masses are, As a moving mountain is, moving through dayAnd night, colored from distances, centralWhere luminous agitations come to rest, In an ever-changing, calmest unity,The unique composure, harshest streakings joinedIn a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round The giant body the meanings of its folds,The weaving and the crinkling and the vex,As on water of an afternoon in the wind After the wind has passed. (CPP 372) Wallace Stevens, in his poem “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” figured this as the sight that met his friend Henry Church, who had recently died. The scene is striking for its conflations of fabrics and geological features. The “robings” are a vehicle for a vague tenor, for instance, and they, then, turn tenor to the vehicle of...

Reconciling Locality and Globalization through Sense of Planet in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods

This study positions the House of Many Gods, a novel written by Kiana Davenport as a possible area of intersection between globalization and environmental/eco-criticism. The primacy of locality within American environmental discourse hinders the acceptance of global theory under the assumption that embracing the global will lead into the erasure of the local altogether. In her book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) Ursula K Heise asserts that what she considers as sense of place is incomplete without considering ourselves as a part of a global ecosystem, which she considers as sense of planet. The reading of the House of Many Gods contextualizes sense of place and sense of planet through the perspective of Ana, in which she complements her adherence of Native Hawai’ian epistemology of place with a broader outlook of environmental crisis. A global outlook of perceiving environmentalism also aligns with Transnational American Studies which perceives America from an internationalist perspective. The paper concludes that sense of place and sense of planet provides a possible intersectionality of conceptualizing local discourse of place within a global outlook of environmentalism.

“Sense of Place and Sense of Planet”: Local-Planetary Experiences of Climate Change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior

Climate change has become a harsh reality of our present times. It is happening here, there, and everywhere unbound by the spatial and temporal dimensions. The vacillating impact of such a global crisis equally demands multiple and concurrent scales in order to accurately comprehend the complexity of the problem. Borrowing the title of my paper from Ursula K. Heise’s book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, where she proposes the concept of ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’, this article aims at reflecting upon the globalization of the present ecocatastrophes, musing upon the local (the experiences of the working class people) and the global scale (Unnatural Migration and thereby extinction of the Monarch Butterflies) impact of the climate crisis. Ursula K. Heise believes that the ‘deterritorialization’ of the local knowledge is not always detrimental rather can open up new avenues into ecological consciousness. Giving consideration to a deterritorialised environmental vision my paper will fall back on Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior– a novel dealing with the eco-apocalypse, climate change and global warming. In providing a deeply humane account of the working people’s response to the local effects of the global crisis along with a poignant account of the impact on a planetary scale- the Migration of the Monarch Butterflies and their extinction, Kingsolver in this novel contextualizes the micro-geographically bounded human experience and memory within the larger context of the global Anthropocene thereby calling for a ‘sense of planet’ along with a ‘sense of place’- which get along with each other.

German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann

Reviewed by: German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene ed. by Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann Timothy Attanucci Heather I. Sullivan and Caroline Schaumann, eds. German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 348 pp. The title of this volume of collected essays is as programmatic as it is succinct. The adjective "German" marks the disciplinary purview of the essays, which emerged from several conference panels organized by the Trans-Atlantic Network in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Washington and the Environmental Studies Network of the German Studies Association. More than a territorial demarcation, however, this disciplinary choice reflects the editors' desire to correct the historical belatedness of German Studies (or Germanistik) in embracing ecocriticism. As one can read in the preface by Americanist Ursula K. Heise and in the editors' introduction, "ecocriticism" first appeared in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and the reasons for Germany's hesitation are varied. Among other things, Heise suggests that the German tradition lacks the genre of "nature writing," but also that its ecological traditions are both burdened with the loaded history of concepts like Heimat and benefit from significant media resonance and political outlets (i.e., the Green Party), whose failure in the American context may explain a complementary boom in US-academic activism. [End Page 336] As the editors point out, however, "the concept of 'nature' has a long-standing and important tradition in German literature, though only few scholars have critically investigated the approaches, definitions, and ramifications of 'nature' in German texts in a theoretical and sustained manner" (11). If this is the case, then, as the editors readily admit, the situation is rapidly changing. In the German context, for example, two introductions to ecocriticism (Bühler, 2016; Dürbeck and Stobbe, 2015) now compete with several other collected volumes (Goodbody and Rigby, 2011; Wilke and Frost, 2013; Duerbeck et al., 2017; Novero, Obermayer, and Barton, 2017). Indeed, another volume published in 2017, Readings in the Anthropocene, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, also takes up the term "Anthropocene," which has become increasingly popular as a designation for our current state of environmental crisis. The preface and the introduction of this volume make a compelling case that the "Anthropocene"—an as yet unofficial epoch of geological time first popularized by Paul Crutzen, and now approved by a special working group of the International Union of Geologic Sciences—presents a significant challenge to environmental thinking and "ecocriticism" alike. In short, accepting that human activity has left a permanent geological record undermines the distinction between a human "inside" and an environmental "outside." We can thus no longer simply "critique" the human relationship to nature, imagined as an ecology without humans, nor the destruction of the environment, imaged as a space surrounding humanity. Or as Heise argues in her frequently cited monograph (Sense of Place; 2010), the Anthropocene forces a transition from a "sense of place" to a "sense of planet." In her preface here, Heise proposes that this "sense of planet" implies a provocation for cultural studies, which until now have relied on a notion of culture delineated by language, tradition, or nation. Without closing itself off to the global impact of the Anthropocene, the essays collected here meet the challenge of demonstrating the value of recognizing cultural specificity—in this instance, German, Swiss, and Austrian specificities, which are often engaged in complex forms of communication with other cultures. The first part of this book takes up the notion of "place" as an organizing principle. In her essay, "The Dark Pastoral: A Trope for the Anthropocene," Heather I. Sullivan argues that the literary category of the pastoral not only still has relevance for ecocriticism in the Anthropocene, but also can serve as a litmus test for the literary history of this new epoch. In tracing the "dark" side, or the "darkening" of the pastoral from Goethe to Storm and Trojanow, Sullivan shows how the growing consciousness of ecological change impacts the German cultural imagination of the idyllic "restriction" (Jean Paul) of ecological places. Simon Richter likewise situates Goethe as the starting point of an Anthropocene, but his "ecoliguistic" approach introduces an innovative marker of cultural change: in the semantic differentiation of...

The Cyborg Flâneur: Reimagining Urban Nature through the Act of Walking

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Book Review of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet by Ursula K. Heise

Book Review of Sense of Place and Sense of Planet by Ursula K. Heise

Biosemiology and Globalism in The Rapture by Liz Jensen

Liz Jensen's novel The Rapture (2009) provides an opportunity to consider Wendy Wheeler's version of biosemiotics in The Whole Creature (2006) and Ursula Heise's advocacy of literary globalism in Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). This essay examines both the kind of new insights they might provide to literary analysis and their respective places within the evolution of ecocriticism. Can such new theories help the reader decide whether this novel is just another apocalyptic thriller? Is The Rapture exploiting or explaining our environmental crisis?

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (review)

Reviewed by: Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global Christian Moraru Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 250 pp. Although risky business, prophecies are nonetheless tempting. So here is one: looking back on the past two decades, the literary-cultural historians of the future—a future not too remote from us, I would think—will in all likelihood see those years as a sort of epistemological intermezzo, a moment of transition from one paradigm to another across the humanities, inside and outside the U.S. It seems to me that a gradual shift has been underway in the human sciences over the last twenty-five years. Concomitant and analogous to recent reorientations in literature, the arts, and geopolitical arrangements, this shift has touched off the progressive albeit uneven legitimizing and academic-intellectual institutionalization of something that might be viewed as a new episteme, a new way of looking at the surrounding world and of producing knowledge about this world. A good number of influential voices in theory, criticism, and cultural studies, in comparative analysis (especially in “new comparatism”), in philosophy (chiefly in ethics), in psychoanalysis (primarily among the “Champ lacanien” group members), in political science, economics, sociology (principally in risk sociology), and in geography have been in the avant-garde of this sea change, having variously anticipated it from the beginning of their careers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Sylviane Agacinski, Guy Scarpetta, Paul Gilroy, Marc C. Taylor, David Hollinger). Others joined this transformative trend a bit later (Jacques Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva) as they turned to cosmopolitan, “postnational,” global, planetary, and “other” (“alterity”-focused) questions years prior to the historical watershed of this transitional interval, the official end of the Cold War. Similarly, many scholars have been associated with older directions such as postmodernism (Jean Baudrillard), postcolonialism (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, K. Anthony Appiah), poststructuralism, and deconstruction (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, J. Hillis Miller). Still others took the lead right before and after 1989 in fields such as comparative and translation scholarship (Henry Sussman, [End Page 179] Timothy J. Reiss, Eugene Eoyang, Rey Chow, Yunte Huang, Zhang Longxi, Emily Apter, Lawrence Venuti, Michael Cronin); cosmopolitanism, world governance, sovereignty, and human rights (Bruce Robbins, Pheng Cheah, Danilo Zolo, Derek Heater, Seyla Benhabib, Will Kymlicka, Daniele Archibugi, José María Rosales, María José Fariñas Dulce, Timothy Brennan, Amanda Anderson, Kok-Chor Tan, Volker Heins, Camilla Fojas, and many more); “cosmocultural,” “geocritical,” “ecocritical,” and “planetary” analysis (Franco Moretti, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gérard Raulet, Bertrand Westphal, Wai Chee Dimock, Lawrence Buell); global, world-system, “network society,” and “empire” studies of various persuasions and foci (Manuel Castells, Arjun Appadurai, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Steven Shaviro, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Amy Kaplan, Roland Robertson, Martin Albrow, David Held, Frederick Buell). Further, some of these are, I suspect, relatively comfortable with the disciplinary tags usually attached to their interventions: Ulrich Beck and Jacques Demorgon (sociology), Peter Singer and Appiah again (ethics). Others, such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Georgio Agamben, await, perhaps in vain, classifications less nebulous than “philosophy.” Additionally, critics like Charles Taylor, Hollinger, Werner Sollors, Benedict Anderson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Charles Johnson, Stuart Hall, Aiwa Ong, John Carlos Rowe, James Clifford, and Giles Gunn, who broke new ground in race, ethnicity, citizenship, community, ethnography, and multicultural studies ten or twenty years ago, in hindsight appear even more forward-looking. Finally, issues such as those intensely addressed by virtually all of the above have rekindled interest in a number of classics, ancient and modern, in philosophy (Stoicism, Spinoza, Husserl, Buber, Levinas), hermeneutics (Gadamer and Ricoeur), psychoanalysis (Lacan), sociology (Tönnies and Simmel), the history of ideas and ideologies (Benda and, more recently, George Steiner, Stephen Toulmin, and Peter Coulmas), anthropology (Clifford Geertz), literary-cultural and discourse studies (Bakhtin), justice theory (Rawls and his “law of people”), history and political economy (Immanuel Wallerstein and, via his work, Braudel and the Annales). Such wide-ranging scholarship revolves systematically and characteristically around the concept of connectedness, of being in, and thus being...

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global

Sense of place and sense of planet: the environmental imagination of the global

Introduction PART 1: WORLD-WIDE WEBS: IMAGINING THE PLANET 1. From the Blue Planet to Google Earth: Environmentalism, Ecocriticism, and the Imagination of the Global 2. Among the Everywheres: Global Crowds and the Networked Planet 3. Adventures in the Global Amazon PART 2: PLANET AT RISK 4. Narrative in the World Risk Society 5. Toxic Bodies, Corporate Poisons: Local Risks and Global Systems 6. Afterglow: Chernobyl and the Everyday Conclusion: Some Like It Hot: Climate Change and Eco-Cosmopolitanism Notes Works Cited