Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:42:11.985Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Beyond Imagining, Imagining Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Lynn Keller
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Particularly because the mla lacks a division on environmental literature, it is gratifying that the organization is turning attention to environmental studies through forums such as this one. Many more in the profession than the fourteen hundred members of the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment take some interest in environmental literature and would like to foster sustainability through their teaching or research. Yet the term is problematic: a popular buzzword, its parameters are vague, and consequently the more difficult questions underlying the concept are too easily evaded. Sustainability of what and for whom? we might ask. Are people talking about sustaining complicated, interwoven biotic communities, sustaining humankind, or sustaining a comfortable lifestyle currently enjoyed by the privileged classes around the globe? What are the term's qualitative implications? What constitute appropriate standards for sustainability, and who decides? What political and economic policies will be necessary? Where will we get the motivation, the will to institute them? Where does sustainability intersect with issues of environmental and social justice, and how will we address the many ethical questions it raises?

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 579 - 585
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Anchor, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
“Colony Collapse Disorder.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, May 2012. Web. 7 May 2012.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. “The Riddle of Sustainability.” U of Wisconsin, Madison. 3 Mar. 2010. Address.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Common Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. Cronon, . New York: Norton, 1995. 69–90. Print.Google Scholar
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iijima, Brenda, ed. The Eco Language Reader. Brooklyn: Portable, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. “Hyperobjects and the End of Common Sense.” The Contemporary Condition. N.p., 18 Mar. 2010. Web. 25 July 2011.Google Scholar
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rawlings, A. Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists. Toronto: Coach, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Reilly, Evelyn. “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux.” Iijima 255–74.Google Scholar
Reilly, Evelyn. Styrofoam. New York: Roof, 2009. Print.Google Scholar
Roberson, Ed. To See the Earth before the End of the World. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2010. Print.Google Scholar
“Robobees: A Convergence of Body, Brain, and Colony.” Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. President and Fellows of Harvard Coll., n.d. Web. 7 May 2012.Google Scholar
Spahr, Juliana. Well Then There Now. Jaffrey: Black Sparrow, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Suryanarayanan, Sainath, and Kleinman, Daniel Lee. “Disappearing Bees and Reluctant Regulators.” Issues in Science and Technology (summer 2011): n. pag. Web. 7 May 2012.Google Scholar
“Sustainability.” EPA. US Environmental Protection Agency, 2 Mar. 2011. Web. 18 July 2011.Google Scholar
“A Sustainable Life.” New York Times 2 Jan. 2011, New York ed.: WK3+. Print.Google Scholar
Welsh, Matt. “Robobees: An Autonomous Colony of Robotic Pollinators.” 2010 USENIX Annual Technical Conf. YouTube. Web. 7 May 2012.Google Scholar
Williams, Raymond. “Ideas of Nature.” Problems of Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980. 67–85. Print.Google Scholar