Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens's Birds
The poems of Wallace Stevens teem with birds: grackles, warblers, doves, swans, nightingales, owls, peacocks, and one famous blackbird who summons thirteen ways of looking. What do Stevens's evocations of birds, and his poems more generally, tell us about the relationship between human and nonhuman? In this book, the noted theorist of posthumanism Cary Wolfe argues for a philosophical and theoretical reinvention of ecological poetics, using Stevens as a test case. Stevens, Wolfe argues, is an ecological poet in the sense that his places, worlds, and environments are co-created by the life forms that inhabit them. Wolfe argues for a "nonrepresentational" conception of ecopoetics, showing how Stevens's poems reward study alongside theories of system, environment, and observation derived from a multitude of sources, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Niklas Luhmann to Jacques Derrida and Stuart Kauffman. "Ecological Poetics" is an ambitious interdisciplinary undertaking involving literary criticism, contemporary philosophy, and theoretical biology.
About the Author
Cary Wolfe is chair and the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor in the Department of English at Rice University. His books include "What Is Posthumanism?" and "Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory", the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.