Sign in with Facebook
Loading...
Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
In "Ecology without Nature," Timothy Morton argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. The problem is a symptom of the ecological catastrophe in which we are living. Morton sets out...more
Hardcover, 249 pages
Published
March 1st 2007
by Harvard University Press
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is not yet featured on Listopia.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
242)
There are some gem-like thoughts that are provocative on their own, but I wish he'd just written it as a series of aphorisms.
EWN reads like a flirty confrontation between Zizek and Derrida, self-aware and ironic in its over-intellectualized pop-culture references and playfully useless in its deconstructive inversions. This isn't a text on the reimagination of ecology against the concept of nature, it's a text on how we might index and reveal the semiotic paradoxes of the history of nature-writing and its nature of writing. I expected more. It's great contemporary literary criticism, but it isn't ecology or ecosophy or...more
Aug 15, 2011
Candy Wood
added it
While I'm not sure Morton's approach to ecological criticism is as new as he thinks it is, it does provide much to think about. In his view, focus on poetic descriptions of nature creates an aestheticizing distance that diverts readers and critics from environmental problems. That means true ecology requires more ironic reading, and acceptance of the nonhuman as what it is rather than trying to remake it in our own image. For him, deconstruction is a powerful tool for doing this, and he clearly...more
A really enjoyable read. Challenging, thought provoking -- both world changing and world destroying. If you're serious about thinking about ecology, you'll need to work your way through the thoughts that Tim Morton is laying out here. I highly recommend reading Morton's blog, listening to MP3s of his lectures and watching his YouTube presentations in concert with reading the book. It's live thought and it's happening now.
The tie ins to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology aren't visi...more
The tie ins to Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology aren't visi...more
Morton's theory of "beautiful soul syndrome" and his readings of ecological literature encourage us to embrace melancholy so that we can accept responsibility without regard to fault.
I applied dark ecology to my reading of Trouble on Triton by Sam Delany to elucidate the six elements of ambient poetics (rendering,tone, medial, aeolian, timbral, and the re-mark) essential to ecomimesis. Morton uses the word ecomimesis to describe nature writing, implying mimicry and Plato’s idea of the poet’s div...more
I applied dark ecology to my reading of Trouble on Triton by Sam Delany to elucidate the six elements of ambient poetics (rendering,tone, medial, aeolian, timbral, and the re-mark) essential to ecomimesis. Morton uses the word ecomimesis to describe nature writing, implying mimicry and Plato’s idea of the poet’s div...more
Abstract. Intellectual. Philosophical.
"the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art" (1).
Chapter one examines art - the limitations of language for representing the environment - a balancing act between there is only language and there is always reality.
Chapter two provides a form of history - rather the rise of the idea of the world (or surrounding environment) in post romanticist writing.
Chapter three is about future potent...more
"the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art" (1).
Chapter one examines art - the limitations of language for representing the environment - a balancing act between there is only language and there is always reality.
Chapter two provides a form of history - rather the rise of the idea of the world (or surrounding environment) in post romanticist writing.
Chapter three is about future potent...more
To begin with a heads-up: the first chapter is actually about ambient music and aesthetic theory. not terrible or anything, but so crowded with name-dropping that the momentum is absolutely murdered. gets better as it goes along, but ends up by repeating Derrida's argument from Specters of Marx, i.e. take a global concept everyone's feeling ambivalent about (Nature, Marxism), critique it while addressing the related movements, advocates, and objects of study only in the most superficial way, the...more
sprawling but brilliant - one of the very few books on ecology and ctulure that I've read that isn't completely missing the point. Full of convincing philosophical perspectives on the roots of the major ecological and human crises, as articulated in mostly literature, but other cultural forms too.
the only problem with this book (as far as I can ascertain from a partial and quick reading) is that this is a book sized project of the paper I wanted to write.
Rigorous.
It reads like a second or third draft, and Morton has problems with logically coherent writing (he often gets distracted by an idea mid-paragraph and loses track of his argument, or he doesn't seem interested in how one sentence might/might not follow on from the one before it). His dismissal of Deleuze & Guattari is also rather provincial and poorly argued. Nevertheless, there's plenty of real value here, and the text deserves to be central to ecocritical studies in coming years.
After a lot of paradoxical sentence-making Ecology Without Nature ended up being about the fact that nature is not something separate from existence. The pursuit of aestheticization of nature, that something out there to which we must escape or return, invalidates much of our struggle to communally bring ourselves under control and consciously develop a program of living within our means - that with which earth enriches us both to our benefit and to our peril.
Nov 06, 2012
Blake Frederick
marked it as to-read
Z
Trash the concept of "nature" outright.
May 15, 2013
Dillon
marked it as to-read
May 12, 2013
Angad Mahal
marked it as to-read
May 02, 2013
Eric
marked it as to-read
Apr 09, 2013
Melissa Mcgrath
marked it as to-read
Apr 07, 2013
Anupam Sarkar
marked it as to-read
Apr 03, 2013
Kacey
marked it as to-read
Mar 30, 2013
Emma
marked it as to-read
Mar 29, 2013
Magdy Shonoda
marked it as to-read
May 19, 2013
Christy
marked it as partially-read
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
