Timothy Morton: Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, animal, art, capitalism, ecocriticism, ecology, environment, kitsch, music, nature, object, phenomenology, philosophy, rhetoric, romanticism, sound
“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 a seeming paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must relinquish the idea of nature once and for all.
Ranging widely in eighteenth-century through contemporary philosophy, culture, and history, Morton explores the value of art in imagining environmental projects for the future. Morton develops a vocabulary for reading “environmentality” in artistic form as well as content, and traces the contexts of ecological constructs through the history of capitalism. From John Clare to John Cage, from Kierkegaard to Kristeva, from The Lord of the Rings to electronic life forms, Ecology without Nature extends the view of ecological criticism. Instead of trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton sets out a new form of ecological criticism: “dark ecology.””
Publisher Harvard University Press, 2007
ISBN 0674024346, 9780674024342
249 pages
Reviews: Keegan (Studies in Romanticism, 2008), Philips (Oxford Literary Review, 2010), Holmes (Journal of Ecocriticism, 2012).
PDF (updated on 2012-10-31)
Comment (0)Noël Carroll: The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, film, philosophy
The philosophy of motion pictures has typically been explored in a top-down fashion. The essence of motion pictures is identified – usually understood in terms of photographic film – and every other feature of the film is weighed in relation to that essence.
Philosophy of Motion Pictures offers a new approach, championing the concept of the moving image in a more freestyle manner. Motion pictures are defined in a way that not only embraces the media in which moving images exist, but which also affirms the variety of purposes they may legitimately serve. Characterizations of key cinematic elements — the shot, the sequence, the erotetic narrative, and its modes of affective address — are not deduced from first principles, but rather from topic to topic in a piecemeal fashion. The result is a more pluralistic review of this emerging field of study than is found in more conventional texts on film theory.
Topics include film as art, medium specificity, defining the moving image, representation, editing, narrative, emotion and evaluation. These topics reflect the legacy of traditional film theory for the contemporary philosophy of the moving image, while suggesting a new direction for theorizing the motion picture.
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing, 2008
ISBN: 140512024X, 9781405120258
256 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)
Comment (0)Nicola Mullenger, Annette Wolfsberger (eds.): Cultural Bloggers Interviewed (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, culture, internet, journalism, publishing
Cultural blogging is not (yet) a well-known category within the blogosphere and LabforCulture wanted to find out more. Who blogs? What are they blogging about? Which audiences and communities are being engaged? What are the economic models and how sustainable are they? These are some of the questions that are explored in the new Cultural Bloggers Interviewed publication.
With Annette Wolfsberger, we delved into the cultural blogging scene in a series of interviews with nine renowned European bloggers including: Anne Helmond, Robert Misik, Alek Tarkowski, Marta Peirano and José de Vicente, Alessandro Ludovico and Régine de Batty.
The bloggers were interviewed in 2009 and were challenged to answer questions about their motivation, business models and subsequent opportunities that came from starting their blogs. With a thought-provoking introduction about the role of blogs by Guardian journalist and blogger Mercedes Bunz, this publication is a must for anyone considering the future role of cultural bloggers and online publishing.
Interviews: Annette Wolfsberger
Idea: Angela Plohman
Editors: Nicola Mullenger and Annette Wolfsberger
Publisher: LabforCulture, Amsterdam 2010
ISBN 978-1-906496-50-0
Published under Creative Commons Licence 3 (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported).