EBOOK
The Weird South
Ecologies Of Unknowing In Postplantation Literature
Melanie Benson TaylorSeries: Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures(0)
About
How do we read southern literature in a postplantation, postregional, and posthuman moment? How do we address the urgent contemporary catastrophes of the Anthropocene in these newly leveled landscapes? Put simply, how do we parse the levels of human responsibility––both for apocalypse and for deliverance––in contexts where settler-colonial and racial capitalist histories dramatically shape our reality?
Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity's detention within what Timothy Morton calls the "weird" web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.
As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the "weird" is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects-neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.
Reading modern and contemporary southern literary texts from a variety of perspectives, these lectures engage the new materialist, object-oriented ontologies that critique and decenter human agency while uncovering the lasting, determinative, haunting realities of humanity's detention within what Timothy Morton calls the "weird" web of our entwined social, racial, economic, and natural ecologies.
As a concept in the burgeoning conversation about Anthropocenic disaster and climate emergency, the "weird" is a powerful way to conceptualize not just human hubris but also humility: we are no different from, no more powerful than, any other living or inanimate objects-neither the organisms that take up residence in our bodies nor the myriad things that we imagine we create, fashion, patrol, and control.
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Reviews
"What makes this book is how it treats what makes the South weird. Rather than define it or cure it, Taylor seeks to learn from that inherent weirdness. Based on the texts she generously explores, her approach to the South's weirdness is to embrace the "dualism" inherent in that definition. We will never find a way to move forward without first acknowledging how we got here, who was hurt in the pr
Toby LeBlanc