Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global [Paperback]

As Heise argues, ecocriticism very much needs to embrace, explore and test the representation of the global, and to do so without merely reproducing the green cliche that everything is connected. Specific connections need identifying: the ones that matter. This important book makes a superb beginning. Richard Kerridge, Times Higher Education Supplement

As Heise argues, ecocriticism very much needs to embrace, explore and test the representation of the global, and to do so without merely reproducing the green cliche that everything is connected. Specific connections need identifying: the ones that matter. This important book makes a superb beginning. (Richard Kerridge, Times Higher Education Supplement )

Offers a wealth of theoretical insight and an intriguing number of exemplary, innovative readings of texts in which the environmental imagination of the global becomes manifest. The study accomplishes nothing less than a far-reaching critical reassessment of the research field of ecocriticism to date, while simultaneously expanding its theoretical and analytical scope for the future ... A significant contribution to place-centered globalization theory in general. (Amerikastudien/American Studies )

Sense of Place and Sense of Planet analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part One critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of "eco-cosmopolitanism" as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part Two focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software and installation artworks from the US and abroad that translate new connections between global, national and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.

Ursula K. Heise is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, where she teaches contemporary literature and literary theory. She is the author of Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism.