James Agee’s complicated life and complex work have elicited varied critical responses, but none thus far by way of the writer’s intriguing relationship with his sometime analyst Frances Wickes. I believe Agee’s autobiographical writings prove both intertextual with and influenced by Wickes’s work, especially in regard to her novel and to The Mor…[Read more]

“People acquire phobias,” evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson observed, to “abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments” (The Diversity of Life 351). This often overlooked observation, conceptualized by an evolu­tionary biologist whose canon launched the Western corpus of…[Read more]

The “Ilfracombe” journals, “Ex Oriente Lux,” and “A Minor Prophet” register the ways in which George Eliot’s nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the developme…[Read more]

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?

Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) nasce ad Asheville, North Carolina. Mentre studia drammaturgia ad Harvard scrive per il teatro, ma il successo arriva con il romanzo autobiografico ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ (1929), seguito da ‘Of Time and the River’ (1935) e dai postumi ‘The Web and the Rock’ (1939) e ‘You Can’t Go Home Again’ (1940). ‘Passage to England: A…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Un tema importante en ‘Mantícora’, la novela de Robertson Davies, es el de la búsqueda de la relación con el padre, por parte de protagonista, David Staunton, abogado alcohólico y solitario, agobiado por su familia rica y por verse desheredado. Pero padres puede haber más de uno, en la realidad o en la imaginación. Y, hay que p…[Read more]

Deep time comes in many forms, including a range of temporal frames, and various approaches to more ethical engagement with the biosphere. In this paper, I explore the recent use and contestation of history, in light of its legacy as a Christian theo- logical project (from Eusebius and Bede into more recent renderings) and a potent political tool.…[Read more]

A hugely prolific and popular writer, Jodi Picoult boasts nearly 30 novels in print worldwide. She has been translated into 34 languages and, in 2018, she was ranked in the “top ten” of Princeton’s most influential living alumni. Yet her name rarely features in the short lists for prestigious literary awards and she is consistently ignored by ac…[Read more]

This paper presents the findings of comparative research into the labor, organizational and spatial practices of a new kind of hybrid civic spaces that we refer to as “social impact-driven repair shops.” These are an emerging typology of urban spaces dedicated to repaired and up-cycled items that also go beyond the functions of a traditional sho…[Read more]

This article offers some provisional analyses of the discourses presented by participants in the School Strike for Climate movement, which (since it began in 2018) has been organised variously under the banners Fridays for Future, Youth for Climate and School Strike 4 Climate.1 This paper contends that the movement goes beyond just…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Unas notas sobre el final del libro ‘El lugar del hombre en el cosmos’ de Fred Spier, sobre la sostenibilidad de la actual comunicación globalizada. La Gran Historia sitúa al ser humano en el contexto de la evolución cósmica y de la ecología de los recursos. Vivimos hoy en la Era de los Combustibles Fósiles. Con esta energ…[Read more]

This essay examines ethnic strife and cultural friction in New Orleans during the Mexican-American war. Specifically, it explores how the Crescent City’s anglophone and francophone populations navigated the tension between national and transnational affiliation through performance. By considering both the material and the immaterial aspects of p…[Read more]

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and e…[Read more]

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola’s ‘La Faute de l’abbé Mouret’ (‘The Sin of Father Mouret’, 1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republi…[Read more]

In ‘Degeneration’ (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siècle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the ‘false science’ in Zola’s Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, how…[Read more]

Course Description: In 2022 we will be looking at the theme of ‘Whose Apocalypse?’. We will develop an understanding of environmental issues such as climate change, resource depletion, long-term pollutants, extinctions, food and water security and more. Rather than assuming these issues affect all humans in similar ways, however, we will explore…[Read more]

Many scholars have argued that climate change is, in part, a problem of time, with ecological, political and social systems thought to be out of sync or mistimed. Discussions of time and environment are often interdisciplinary, necessitating a wide-ranging use of methods and approaches. However, to date there has been practically no direct…[Read more]