Posthumanism and Environmental Poetics in American Literature

The global climate crisis is perhaps the most pressing issue that is bringing increasing attention (of governments, activists, and intellectuals) to the environment and the relations of the human with the organic and inorganic nonhuman world in the Anthropocene. On the other hand, the recent academic preoccupation for the ways in which subjectivity, its manifestations – agency, creativity, intentionality, etc. – and its terms of engagement with language have been called into question by what can be synthetically called philosophical posthumanism, has inaugurated a productive season of critical engagement with the question of the relation between art and literature and the environment. Beside igniting a steady process of revision of the epistemic premises on which human claims about the environment are made, this critical engagement has also expanded the academic conversation about the impact of environmental concerns on literary aesthetics and, vice versa, about the influence of art and literature on conventional perceptions and definitions of the environment. As a result, a growing body of literary, artistic, and philosophical works, often characterized by a marked interdisciplinary orientation, has brough into the horizon of academic criticism an acute awareness of the interconnections between humans and their environments. It is on the terrain of this interconnection and of the deep revision it entails of our ways of thinking the role of the literary work in relation to, on the one hand, the philosophical and theoretical, and, on the other, the ecological, that we present papers addressing American literature and art’s creative interventions on how we understand the world around us, our place in it, and the place of the literary in it.