Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics

by J J Cohen

Congratulations to Alfred Kentigern Siewers for the publication of his new edited collection, Re-Imagining Nature: Environmental Humanities and Ecosemiotics [Amazon link since Buknell UP doesn't have the book online yet, and here you can search and preview the volume].

I'll reproduce the ToC below. You will see that the book offers quite a mix of new and "classic" material. The introduction ("Song, Tree and Spring: Environmental Meaning and Environmental Humanities") is quite good, arguing for the ways in which medieval and American Indian sources for ecocriticism interconnect. Indigenous traditions are essential to the volume, but without romanticizing such tradition into earthy wisdom (or deploying what Larry Buell famously labelled the Ecological Indian). An animating tension of the volume is between the materialism so important to recent ecocriticism and the "immaterialities" of life as communication-making that are foregrounded within phenomenology and ecosemiotics.

Re-Imagining Nature is, unfortunately, rather expensive ($75-90 depending on where purchased) but this would be a good one to request that your library order.


Contents 
Chapter 1: Introduction - Song, Tree, and Spring: Environmental Meaning and the Environmental Humanities Part One: Backgrounds 
Chapter 2: The Ecopoetics of Creation: Genesis LXX 1-3 By Alfred Kentigern Siewers 
Chapter 3: Place and Sign: Locality as a Foundation for Ecosemiotics By Timo Maran 
Chapter 4: Learning from Temple Grandin, or, Animal Studies, Disability Studies, and Who Comes after the Subject By Cary Wolfe Part Two: Medieval Natures 
Chapter 5: "The Secret Folds of Nature": Eriugena's Expansive Concept of Nature By Dermot Moran 
Chapter 6: The Nature of Miracles in Early Irish Saints' Lives By John Carey 
Chapter 7: Inventing with Animals in the Middle Ages By Jeffrey Jerome Cohen Part Three: Re-Negotiating Native Natures 
Chapter 8: The Yua as Logoi By Fr Michael Oleksa 
Chapter 9: Intersubjectivity with "Nature" in Plains Indian Vision-seeking By Kathryn W. Shanley 
Chapter 10: The Experience of the World as the Experience of the Self: Smooth Rocks in a River Archipelago By Katherine M. Faull 
Chapter 11: Human Geographies and Landscapes of the Divine in Ibero-American Borderlands By Cynthia Radding 
Chapter 12: Call and Response: The Human/Non-Human Encounter in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms By Sarah Reese 
Suggested Reading 
Bibliography